I expected to be a lot more repulsed by this book than I was, going by the reviews. Yes, at times it was a tad graphic (!) but at the same time we have this strong protagonist who revels in her body and its functions, perhaps to stop herself focusing on her world, which is falling apart despite her best efforts. I found it a repugnant and beautiful read! ( )

Bad, I could not finish. Much better perverse literature out there. This is bunk. ( )

Well, it was what it was and she either had her hand up her cunt or up her arse just about most of the time. I honestly don't know how she managed to type. Maybe she didn't type but instead just daubed on the walls. Whatever, but there sure was a lot of that stuff, more than anywhere else I have yet to read. I can remember reading one bit and starting to see where it was going and thinking to myself, "she couldn't", then, "she wouldn't", then "of course she did".

And somewhere along the way I kinda thought that the whole point of it was "of course she did".

I found none of it shocking or disgusting, I mean, who hasn't had their fingers in the their own, or someone else's, orifices at some point or another and revelled in it? Well, I have but never enough to write a whole book about.

I did like the subtext of the parents story and was a bit sorry there wasn't more substance to it, maybe I should have said I wished the parents had been more solid and not just another smear on the wall. ( )

Reading "The Wetlands" made me think of a comment I once saw posted on a slightly seedy internet comment board in which some guy bemoaned the fact that French and German porn actresses tended to bore him because they were too comfortable with sex. Watching them go at it, he said, was sort of like watching them do aerobics, albeit using some unusual equipment. It got me thinking: maybe you can be too comfortable with sex! It might be lapsed Catholic in me talking, but maybe the idea that our naughty bits are indeed naughty adds something important to our sexual experiences. "The Wetlands" seems to confirm this hypothesis. Never have I read a novel so explicit and yet so dull.

The explicit elements of this book have probably been described by other reviewers at length, so I won't go them here, save to say that Helen Memmel, our protagonist, has such a blasé attitude towards her own body that it verges on disassociation. Forget a mind-body connection: Helen describes her body as if it's a piece of furniture and hasn't yet secreted a bodily fluid she isn't perfectly at home with. Perhaps the author's trying to desacrilize the body or normalize its functions, or maybe she's trying to tweak Americans' supposedly overly puritanical conceptions of their own bodies. Either way, it makes "The Wetlands" a pretty flat and unexciting read. This is especially true since Helen herself isn't that interesting: even for a teenage protagonist, who might be forgiven for not being especially reflective, she's glib and self-centered. Heck, I'm not too sure that "shallow" isn't the correct adjective here. We watch her irritate nurses, manipulate doctors, and recount a couple of bodily fluid-intensive experiences without gaining much insight into the life that she may or may not have. Helen's a dirty, dirty girl, but not in the exciting sense that that phrase usually implies. The novel could probably have been improved by periodic visits from the grinning, broad-shouldered bald guy on the Mr. Clean bottle.

And that, I guess, is my main problem with "The Wetlands." I'm just some American with a rather tense relationship with microbes, but I imagine that you'd have to go through some pretty significant trauma to get to where Helen is in this novel. And, yes, she talks about a couple of genuinely unpleasant incidents her past in her usual afectless tone. But there's little emotional resonance here. A lot of what passes for the emotional underpinnings to Helen's character is day-dreamy, by-the-numbers teenage sentimentality and doesn't seem to explain, never mind justify, the weird, messy place that she's ended up. Frankly, this kitschy stuff's a lot less forgivable than all of Helen's talk about her secretions and orifices. There are probably places here where the author could have made a larger point about modern society's relationship with impurity and our physical selves, but Helen's not really the right vessel for that: there's little in the way of social critique here.

So that's it. "The Wetlands" is recommended to fans of outré literature who have a high tolerance for discussions of all things proctological, people interested in literary depictions of the body -- of which I admit I'm one -- absolutely shameless perverts, and nobody else. Remember to wash your hands thoroughly after reading this one. ( )

*2015 Reading Challenge* A book with bad reviews