Book Review: Candy, by "Maxwell Canton"
Apr. 21st, 2008 05:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsCandy by "Maxwell Canton" (a psuedonym for Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg) is a 1958 novel that is apparently fondly remembered by lots of its fans for its breathless descriptions of an excessively naive, manipulable and attractive young lady as she careens through one bizarre encounter after another while a rolling cast of late-50s stereotypical characters attempts to seduce her: her teacher Professor Mephesto, her Uncle Jack and his wife Livia (who apparently also swings wildly between cocaine-fueled cockwhore and sullen brat), the peculiar Dr. Krankeit and the desperate Dr. Duncan, and thereafter by equally creepy physicians, doctors, police officers, cult leaders, Communists, religious gurus, and finally The Buddha himself. Very few of these men (and sadly, never Livia) ever get into her pants; those that do tend to have less-than-succesful moments. The book is replete with descriptions of her lush nakedness and cute euphemisms for various body parts.
The book is really a succession of farcical set-pieces about pretentious teachers, "liberated" women, the weird "sexology" of the late 1950's, the rise of strange religious cults (although why they take a swipe at the Quakers I can't tell), the relationships between cops and gay bars at the time. There's an almost painfully extended piece about Jews and the way they did or did not integrate well with the larger American community at the time. (I write "painfully" because there were a lot of men from my family and their extended communities who bore the scars of those battles. One of my relatives in the early 1970s delighted his mother by becoming a law professor-- "A doctor and a lawyer!"-- a career which he almost immediately abandoned to write porn. Sadly, I'm not actually related to him and my parents adamantly refused to tell me his pen name.)
I found the book a bit disappointing. I can see how it was a thrill to read in 1960. I can see how the authors thought it was subversive and funny. But one of the things I've learned in the past forty years is that we don't really run to a reductio world when we have one of these bizarre societal adolescent moments; instead, we outgrow them, establish a new equilibrium, and move on. It was a "smile, yeah, that was probably amusing once" kind of book.
I should probably track down a copy of The Happy Hooker and reread it. Xaveria Hollander was my introduction to the perversity of the world.
The book is really a succession of farcical set-pieces about pretentious teachers, "liberated" women, the weird "sexology" of the late 1950's, the rise of strange religious cults (although why they take a swipe at the Quakers I can't tell), the relationships between cops and gay bars at the time. There's an almost painfully extended piece about Jews and the way they did or did not integrate well with the larger American community at the time. (I write "painfully" because there were a lot of men from my family and their extended communities who bore the scars of those battles. One of my relatives in the early 1970s delighted his mother by becoming a law professor-- "A doctor and a lawyer!"-- a career which he almost immediately abandoned to write porn. Sadly, I'm not actually related to him and my parents adamantly refused to tell me his pen name.)
I found the book a bit disappointing. I can see how it was a thrill to read in 1960. I can see how the authors thought it was subversive and funny. But one of the things I've learned in the past forty years is that we don't really run to a reductio world when we have one of these bizarre societal adolescent moments; instead, we outgrow them, establish a new equilibrium, and move on. It was a "smile, yeah, that was probably amusing once" kind of book.
I should probably track down a copy of The Happy Hooker and reread it. Xaveria Hollander was my introduction to the perversity of the world.
