Outside of A Series of Unfortunate Events , the endlessly witty and ingenious children’s novels he writes under the pseudonym Lemony Snicket, Daniel Handler’s works are uneven mixtures of sardonic humour and old-fashioned sentiment.
In that regard, his latest release, All the Dirty Parts, is consistent. It’s a stiff misfire throughout, a bit like a romp in the sack that never reaches climax. Like its puberty-addled protagonist, the novel can’t decide whether it wants to snicker at raunchy carnal rituals or soberly navigate what sex means to relationships, gender roles and sexual identity.
Cole, a libidinous high school student, has already built up, according to his friend Kirsten, a rep (short for reputation), courtesy 11 girls at school. If he were Def Leppard, he would constantly croon “Pour some sugar on me”. Cole relays his sexual encounters and porn habits to his best friend Alec. The two eventually experiment sexually although Cole is bashful.
When Grisaille (pronounced Grizz-eye), a new girl from Portugal joins school, she and Cole find themselves drawn to each other. However, he soon finds himself increasingly afloat in a relationship where he isn’t the one holding all the cards.
In Adverbs (2006),a series of interconnected love stories, Handler explored similar themes — love, sex, power dynamics, masculinity and saudade — sometimes profoundly.
The brevity of those stories as well as their narrative style accentuated their impact. All the Dirty Parts , however, feels frivolous, much like a Tinder flirtationship.
Written in a manner that can only be described as ‘stream of horniness’, it is quaint, like a newly discovered copy of a scandalous out-of-print book from several decades ago. Teenage boys living in today’s democratised era of pornography will easily find smuttier works with more exuberant accounts of doing the deed (no medicine for the spoonful of sugar).
Adults are even less likely to find sapiosexual pleasures in the novel’s latex-thin insights. There are glimmers of a work that jauntily navigates male sexuality and sexual euphoria. Sadly, by the end, you’ll wish you had pulled out of the book early. The key to promising literary relationships, it would seem, are hedonists, not moralists.
An editor at a children’s publishing house, the writer worships at the altar of Michael Chabon .
All the Dirty Parts; Daniel Handler, Bloomsbury, ₹499
