Exhibitionism

Toby Litt’s main strength as a writer seems to be a talent for taking an odd and difficult premise and then just running with it until he can run no more. In the only other work by him I read, Hospital, he created a weird blend of disaster flick, soap opera and surrealism that was exhausting, strange, constructed, de-constructed and pretty wonderful. In this collection of short stories that streak is present in some of the stories, sadly missing in others.

This is the kind of collection that doesn’t feel as if it was written to be published as one volume. The stories are very disparate, despite a (rather silly) attempt to organize them in two sections: “sex” and “other subjects”. About a third of the stories are very good, show more most of the rest are interesting. A few fall flat, mostly due to being over stylized or aiming for shock value in a rather strained way. Almost all the best ones are in the section NOT about sex – if that comes as a surprise to anyone.

While I really like a story about a future city suddenly filling up with water, with the same sort of dreamlike imagery as in Hospital, my favorites here are stories closer to realism. Still odd, weird even, but on a smaller scale. Like the one about the young boys with alien abduction fantasies who inadvertently swap underpants. Or the one where a script-writer on the verge of a break-through finds it literally impossible to quit his dish-washer job. Or the one about how the porn industry was revolutionized by casual talk about furniture. A handful of these stories are truly great, with a flavor very much of their own. Too bad some rather forgettable ones bring this book a notch. show less

An interesting collection, though some of the stories I felt were stronger than others. The more surreal pieces (Dreamgirls, The Waters) reminded me of Murukami, but the story I liked best was the one about the psychologically cojoined lesbian lovers in Mimi (Both of Her) and Me (Hardly There at All). Then there's the quaintly titled On the Etiquette of Eye-Contact During Oral Sex which I suppose is the story everyone will turn to first. It's amusing, but as in his story about the porn industry written in the form of a shooting script, - sometimes the idea behind the story turns out to be wittier than the story itself.