Miasha

Swing
By Miasha
Infamous/Akashic
Reviewed by Karl Wolff

Tracing the lives of four couples who frequent the Atlanta swingers club Puss & Boots, Swing represents a unique convergence. Classifying it as erotica, urban fiction, and swinger fiction would all be accurate. The couples include Lyssa and Jacob, owners of the club and enterprising empty nesters. Danielle and Stewart are club regulars who met at a swingers club and then got married. JuJu and Ferrari are marriage of opposites. She's an show more aging supermodel, he's a waiter, an introvert, and twenty years her junior. Tori and Kevin are also married and Tori decides to give her husband a present by taking him to a swingers club.

What follows is four storylines on a collision course with each other. Appearances become deceptive as relationships unravel. We discover that JuJu is emotionally and physically abusive to Ferrari. Danielle and Stewart also have another agenda beyond luring couples to join them in their VIP room. The drama ramps up because of the toxic contagion of adultery. While this may sound absurd, at least to those with more conventional sexual habits, it is a real concern to all involved. Swinger clubs have specific sets of rules and it is a microcosm of society, existing with a parallel social contract. "Things get real," when this social contract is violated. At root, the swinger club functions because of mutual consent. Unlike polyamorous relationships, swinging involves temporary relationships that may or may not reunite the sexual partners. When it is discovered that Danielle and Stewart have been secretly taping couples and uploading it on to their own porn website, another couple takes matter into their own hands.

Beyond the sex, class runs like a livewire through the narrative. Unfortunately this may become obscured to readers and reviewers, especially since class and race are so inextricably linked in United States history and legislation. Why do they have to keep a brother down? Well, the United States has and had countless laws, customs, and Supreme Court decisions to make that happened. And anyone who criticized this was a carpetbagging meddler or Communist sympathizer.

But Swing can be classified as "urban fiction" only tangentially, since most of the characters are middle- and upper-middle-class African-Americans (and Ferrari, who is a Brazilian expat). Classifying a piece of fiction as "urban" because it has mostly African-American characters seems both too narrow and too condescending. Book reviewers and critics have decried "urban" and "hip-hop" lit as trading in negative African-American stereotypes, but what is really required is a Roland Barthes-esque dissection of the term, its connotations, and its history. The tendency for whites to think "urban = black" says more about the white people than about the multiplicity and variety of African-American experience in the United States.

As I said before, most of the characters are wealthy and comfortable. But they are also in touch with their roots. Because of the sensational nature of the swinger community, they have to "pass" as normal vanilla (sexually speaking) couples. (And the anguished complexities of "passing" by African-Americans in white communities has a long tradition in African-American literature.) When the repercussions of a couple's actions might lead to being outed as a swinger, they realize that their family will be scandalized. (One also recalls the mixed results of the 2008 election, with Barack Obama becoming the first African-American President and California passing Proposition 8, a law resurrecting the spirit of Jim Crow for American gays. The "down low" phenomenon among the African-American community remains a real problem.) Back to the point, because these couples have acquired newfound economic power, they will do anything to keep that power. How far they will go drives the engine of the narrative. Adultery is simply the spark that sets off the firestorm.

The only quibbles I have are minor. Miasha populates her novella with real people with real issues. There are beautiful bodies engaging in sexual acrobatics, but beneath the toned abs and curvaceous bods are compelling characters, each driven to desperation. There are some passages that read like cliches, but just as many sparkling and acidic bon mots. JuJu is part Naomi Campbell, part Lady Macbeth, in her egomaniacal drive to dominate.

Swing is a sleazy little gem of a book you can read at the beach or on the commute. Short, dirty, and a riveting page-turner. With Swing, Akashic Press's mission of literary "reverse gentrification" becomes that much clearer. Literary gentrification seeks to make things polished, bland, and monotonous (see the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop). This is literature with teeth and claws.

A final note, Swing was published by Akashic's imprint, Infamous, curated by Albert "Prodigy" Johnson, a member of the hip-hop group Mobb Deep.

Out of 10/8.0; higher for fans of erotica, urban fiction, and those in "the life."

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Early reviewer copy. Miasha's "Swing" was a fun, quick read, although a little uneven at times. More of a novella, running a scant 150 pages in small-format paperback, the story has decent pace and includes a fair amount of arousing sexual descriptions. That being said, I felt the story was a bit light on detail and character, in part to trying to follow four separate story lines involving a multitude of characters in such a short format. All-in-all a fun read and I'll look for more of show more Miasha's work in the future. 2.5 stars out of 4 show less

I received a free copy of Switch through the Library Thing Early Reviewers Program. All opinions expressed are my own.
I learned from this book that I am a bit of a prude and really should not enter to win free books with this subject matter. However, I want to be fair in my assessment of the book, which surprisingly turned out to be good and thankfully brief. I don’t know if I could have read much more. The language was graphic to say the least, but how could one write a book about couples show more into the swingers’ scene without using colorful language? I found the characters to be completely unlikable and in the end I was actually hoping bad things would happen to them. This is the first book I’ve ever read where upon reading someone was murdered I thought, “good, you kind of deserved that!” I do think that once one gets past the initial shock of the incredibly vulgar language (at times) and the gratuitous sex scenes (again it is about swingers, so maybe all that sex is necessary to paint the picture of what that lifestyle is about) it is a pretty decent read. It held my interest until the end.
One thing that was a bit disturbing was how everyone in the book just had sex with everyone else and there wasn’t even the slightest concern about disease transmission. There was a brief mention of condoms, but considering just WHAT they were doing, condoms clearly were not enough. Otherwise it should have ended with “and they ALL caught horrible diseases and died miserably, itchy and in pain.” show less

This book is a quick, easy read. It kept me interested, but I could never get emotionally vested with any of the characters. I really felt like I needed a bath through most of the book. Not because of the erotic scenes, which were few and far between, but because every character in the book was pretty unlikable and sleazy. The only character I felt even remotely sorry for was Kevin. Ever one else was sorely lacking in anything that resembled common decency. While I didn't hate this book, I show more really didn't like it much either. Maybe if the characters had been given more depth, or background, I could have felt some empathy for their plights. I'm not sure if the author is making a statement that swinging is bad, and this is what happens to you when you are in that lifestyle, or if swinging was just a random plot device to put in a few erotic scenes. show less