One-track mind
The teenage boy with the always-erect penis wouldn’t be a bad circus attraction if it weren’t, for many teenage boys, reality. Daniel Handler’s novel “All The Dirty Parts” takes the blunt and constant presence of a male teen’s sexuality and considers it with utmost seriousness. The 17year-old narrator of Handler’s book, Cole, eschews fleshing out a world for a world of flesh, and the resultant text reads like an object lesson in unbridled teen-on-teen horniness, in all of its joys and consequences.
At the start of the book, Cole has slept with 11 girls. He’s sexually active and everyone knows it. In part because he tells them: Cole messages details about his postpubescent encounters online to his best friend Alec, who finds them “hot.” So hot, in fact, that their relay becomes regular, shifts into the two friends masturbating together, having sex, and the eventual shame and guilt on Cole’s part about what said fun might mean for his very young and naive sexual identity.
But boys don’t dwell, and soon a Portuguese exchange student with armpit hair moves to town. In Grisaille, Cole has met his match. She likes sex as much as he does. Over the course of the semester, she translates part of Rilke’s Third Duino Elegy (which is about sex) and the two spend a lot of time in bed and on the floor. Cole’s flesh wants what it wants, and, having been sated, things begin to get complicated. Somewhere in Cole’s relationship with Grisaille, his heart appears, just in time to be broken. Cole’s basic conceit is this: “There are love stories galore, and we all know them. This isn’t that. The story I’m typing is all the dirty parts.” Handler’s book isn’t pornographic. There is the expected and regular onslaught of genitalia, but the book is made up of short fragments — things happen too quickly, and there are no great, immersive accumulations of experience designed to please the everyday reader of erotica. Cole is no Marquis de Sade, either: Sexual ministrations aren’t religious or ritualistic as much as they are giddy occasions to feel like blurts of the Look Mom, No Hands type variety. The language is what’s sensuous here, and Handler often dips his toe into Joyce — never a full descent into the Irishman’s decadence, but the two are kinsmen in how fast their prose moves, at the speed of rushing blood. There’s a dedication to Prince on the last page of the book, and the dedication is relevant insofar as when Cole looks in the mirror, how he sees himself isn’t far from how Maggie Nelson described Prince, “an electric ribbon of horniness and divine grace.”
But mirrors often play tricks, and Cole is absolutely not Prince. Because while he may think of himself as pure sexual energy, there is a dangerous voltage in the current. “Even staircases are ugly,” Cole says near the beginning of the book, and it’s hard not to imagine the boy inserting his tender malehood into any object, animate or not. The book walks a tightrope to portray the realistic male teen — how to keep Cole horny and dumb while not succumbing to the problematic implications of such toxic masculinity — but Handler is a skillful and thoughtful enough writer that “All the Dirty Parts” makes clear that Cole’s perspective is only one side of things. “If you can’t see the complication, you’re probably it,” he realizes toward the end, and for most of the book, simple and joyful as he may be, Cole is the complication.
Handler has trod this ground before, having written about both high school and sex. And while “All the Dirty Parts” is the dirtiest of the six novels published under his own name, it’s largely by virtue of excision: What’s not dirty is left out. Here, life is the impediment. When Cole walks by the unnamed sandwich shop, or drinks Grisaille’s mother’s tea for cramps, it’s incidental. Only brief moments of minimal detail precede sex, talk about sex, or, as the book goes on, emotions that stem from the other person with whom Cole has sex. In these emotions, there is yearning, and while Cole’s journey is not Siddartha, steps toward selfactualization are taken — baby ones, ultimately, that in the end are just a glimmer among the flesh and sweat.
“It’s one thing to write a love poem,” begins Rilke’s Third Duino Elegy in the translation that Cole repeats as a refrain, and it’s another thing to show a decidedly rare beast in literature: the horny teen boy, getting what he wants. Handler has done it both raucously and sensitively. While Cole’s implications are unarguably problematic, Handler’s no didact. And so here’s the object lesson: The horny teen boy is horny, is a teen, is a boy. What readers decide to do with these facts is up to them. But take what’s here and use it: Problematic as it might be, it is real.
Hayden Bennett is the deputy editor of the Believer. Email: books@sfchronicle.com.