22 Minutes of Unconditional Love

May 1, 2020
Merkin, whose nonfiction has dealt with her own depression and sexual obsessions, now offers a "novel about a sexual obsession." Narrator Judith Stone, a New York City writer securely married to radiologist Richard and pregnant with their second child, announces to the reader that she's writing the story of an intensely carnal affair years before her marriage because it still haunts her in ways she wants to resolve. Judith writes about her younger self in the third person as a character in a novel, but here and there narrator Judith breaks into the story to offer what she calls digressions and speak directly to the reader about her thoughts and writing process. Unfortunately, this potentially interesting concept falls flat because character-Judith and narrator-Judith offer the same compulsive self-analyzing. Character-Judith's affair occurred when she was a young book editor with a limited sexual history despite what narrator-Judith calls "striking looks." The object of her affection, or at least lust, was Howard Rose, a criminal lawyer at least 10 years her senior, whom she met at a party three weeks after her adored therapist's death--transference upon transference. Judith and Howard carried on for the next eight months. According to Judith, sex with Howard Rose was 50 shades of ecstasy and awakened her previously dormant capacity for erotic passion. But the repeated descriptions of insertions and wetness become a blur of run-of-the-mill physical machinations and phone sex. Character-Judith considered Howard "a jerk," maybe even a pervert. Or was he simply an aggressive lawyer-type settled into middle-aged bachelorhood? Maybe she shouldn't have disparaged his early warning that "I'm the wrong guy" for her because he was too old and poor. But narrator-Judith has little interest in Howard as a human being with feelings and motivations. Despite displays of social wit and literary smarts, Judith fails as both narrator and character, not because she is untrustworthy but because her self-absorption is boring. Who knew hot sex could be such a drag.

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May 11, 2020
Merkin’s ambitious and erotic tale (after her memoir This Close to Happy) looks back on 1990s New York City to chronicle an obsessive, torturous love affair between Judith Stone, a young book editor, and criminal defense attorney Howard Rose, 13 years her senior. In Judith’s third week of mourning the death of her psychiatrist, whom she was in love with, Judith meets Howard at a party and is immediately drawn to him. They embark on an intense sadomasochistic relationship, which Judith initially resists, then allows Howard to push her boundaries. Judith remains captive to Howard’s “allure of remoteness, affection edged in ice and always on the verge of melting away,” and Merkin includes copious, repetitive descriptions of their sexual encounters. Merkin captures Judith’s distinct perspective as a single woman working and dating in the early ’90s from two levels of remove: first, in a prologue with Judith’s narration a decade later and then in a series of authorial “Digressions” (“Peekaboo, I see you, out there in the world, holding this book”), in which Merkin muses on the nature of women’s submission and desire, and the viability of writing a novel. While inventive, these interruptions fail to achieve a new formal approach and shed too little light on the depth of Judith and Howard’s relationship. Merkin’s tale has its moments but falls short of her better work.

June 1, 2020
Because there is no end to the hunger for unconditional love, muses the narrator of this wily tale of carnal obsession as she ponders her need to recount her enthrallment and track her furious inner struggle to overcome it. Judith Stone is a young New York book editor whose intelligence far outstrips her romantic confidence. When she forces herself to go to a party and meets an older lawyer, Howard Rose, his abrupt sexual aggression breaks through all her defenses, hurling her into erotic servitude. Acclaimed and audacious essayist, novelist, and memoirist (This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression, 2017) Merkin is at her sly and provocative best as her brainy, candid, and witty protagonist intermittently interrupts the erotic spell of her addiction to address the reader and question everything from gender roles to therapy to the very nature of fiction. With psychological acuity, sexual heat, and now sadly nostalgic scenes of a pre-pandemic city "at full tilt, Merkin's incisive novel of a woman piloting herself through the wildfire of sexual obsession is as boldly canny as it is cleverly diverting.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)