Avery Qurashi Reviews:

RM Vaughan, Pervatory, Coach House Books, 2023
Russell Smith, Ed., Secret Sex: An Anthology, Dundurn Press, 2024 

Pervatory and Secret Sex are so saturated with portraits of sex that their pages practically drip with the fluids that fill their respective narratives: sweat, saliva and semen, to name a few. Although both books are different in form, they each showcase their authors’ keen awareness of the power that words hold to arouse. In a story from Secret Sex entitled ‘My Skin Isn’t What It Used to Be,’ the narrator admits to his girlfriend, upon receiving a gift of porn magazines, that ‘images don’t stir [him] as much as words,’ and he goes on to explain to the reader that ‘if a writer is going to describe a sexual experience, the writer should know a thing or two about the English language.’ The minds behind Pervatory and Secret Sex expertly demonstrate, through each description of a kiss, nibble, spank or caress, that they live up to this qualification. While both texts journey deep into the pornographic, neither can be dismissed as mere smut. Whether capturing the excitement of a new Hinge match or highlighting the banality of BDSM, both books present scenes of intimacy that expand conventional understandings of what constitutes the erotic, emphasizing that experiences of sex are as beautifully varied as the people who participate in and co-create them. 

The novel Pervatory was edited and posthumously published three years after the death of author RM Vaughan in 2020. It is narrated by a middle-aged writer named Martin who, dissatisfied with the direction his personal and professional lives have taken in Toronto, relocates to Berlin, a city known for its flourishing kink scene. There, Martin indifferently passes his time by moving between leather bars, kink clubs and dungeon parties, largely underwhelmed by the spectacles of sex that surround him. Considering his perception of sex throughout his life as a whole, Martin confesses that many of the highlights of his storied sexual history ‘became exciting or ironically glamorous only after the fact,’ and that during most of his sexual encounters, he has found himself feeling ‘stupid and detached.’ His dissatisfaction increases in the German capital, in a city that, according to him, offers ‘the exact and correct atmosphere for casual sex.’ He observes that in Berlin, ‘You can take the dog to the park or take yourself around the corner and bend over a fisting bench in a filthy piss-stained backroom. It’s all the same. Nothing seems to register with Berliners as novel or extreme.’ Through his blasé catalogue of hookups, Martin strips Berlin’s kink scene of its transgressive mystique, while he nonetheless continues to frequent the clubs and bars, hopeful he may happen upon an unlikely glimmer of excitement.

Martin’s sexual ennui eventually evaporates at a kink club on ‘Blue Monday Pansexual Chillout Night’—an event he describes as ‘[b]oring straight people night.’ As he stands in the middle of the dimly lit venue, feeling ‘about as sexy as a potted carnation,’ he spots Alexandar, a brawny, well-kempt man who introduces himself with a kiss before swiftly and skillfully overpowering Martin, bringing him to orgasm with two fingers and ‘the sound of hand hitting rump,’ and then disappearing without a goodbye. Captivated, Martin spends weeks searching for Alexandar in Berlin’s gay bars and sex clubs to no avail, until eventually the two men encounter one another at a punk bar, where within minutes of arriving, Martin is in a back alley, playing the role of Alexandar’s submissive. A third chance meeting solidifies the bond between the two men, and they begin a relationship—Martin’s first real relationship—founded upon an intense physical connection that makes Martin feel both euphoric and, at times, endangered. Martin (usually) delights in being pushed to the frontiers of pain and humiliation, and he wonders, ‘How do you tell the man you love that you love him the most when you think he’s going to kill you?’ 

As Martin’s affection for Alexandar evolves, however, he struggles to learn more about his beloved and becomes increasingly wary of the stranger who shares his bed. Martin ponders not only the minor details of Alexandar’s life—for instance, has he ‘shaved his bum’?—and speculates too about more significant details, such as Alexandar’s nationality and even his occupation, as Alexandar’s biography remains opaque to Martin throughout the duration of their romance. Martin is hopeful he may come to know more about his lover during a spontaneous night out with Alexandar’s friends, but several shots of a mystery liqueur rob Martin of consciousness and when he awakens, he finds himself in the centre of a strange and violating ritual. As the novel reaches its climax, Alexandar’s inscrutability foments a profound paranoia within Martin, which develops into a madness that ultimately renders him a questionable narrator. Dark, irreverent, perceptive and lewd, Pervatory yields neither to readerly expectations nor to conventional sexual mores as it presents a lustful love story that is as troubling as it is mystifying.

The story anthology Secret Sex offers a different variety of mystery as it presents 24 pieces of short fiction that all share a general focus on sex. What makes Secret Sex unique is that each story is anonymously authored. While readers are told which Canadian writers have contributed to the collection, they are not privy to the knowledge of which story belongs to which writer. In the introduction to the collection, editor Russell Smith discusses ‘how much authors…agonize over the question of how people are going to respond to any description of sex, and how nervous authors are about accidentally revealing details of their own sexual predilections by fictionalizing them.’ Secret Sex is an experiment that sets out to find what prominent voices in Canadian literature will dream up with the freedom that privacy affords, as it seeks to push back against the sort of sex-negativity that produces Literary Review’s annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award, as well as provide imaginative alternatives to the ‘clumsily written S/M erotica’ that often upholds misogynistic and heteronormative sexual ideals. The stories that comprise Secret Sex range from raunchy to romantic, from heartfelt to hilarious, as they celebrate sex in its many forms and genres. 

The opening story, ‘Sext,’ is a transcript of a cheeky message exchange that both begins and ends with a classic ‘u up?’ text. ‘Calliope,’ on the other hand, takes place in Paris, centuries earlier, and is narrated by a disembodied brain that spends years witnessing the sexual exploits of its human companion, a young doctor at the Pitié Salpêtrière, until it is unknowingly conscripted into playing an essential role in one of the doctor’s romantic science experiments. ‘The Politics of Passion’ details the beginnings of an unlikely romance between a white government lawyer and an Anishinaabe community leader who spot one another across a conference table during treaty negotiations, while ‘Party, Party, (Sex) Party’ presents an evening in the life of a broke international grad student who desperately searches for a toilet on his way to an orgy in Montreal. 

Each in their own way, the stories ‘Maria’ and ‘After Nicolette’ explore the healing power of masturbation, when after reconnecting with desire after breakups, their characters are newly able to access the joy of self-love. Despite falling prey to a sextortion scheme, the protagonist of ‘Maria’ realizes that he is grateful for a catfish who helps him to realize that ‘he’s alive in the world, there’s nothing shameful in that.’ On a trip to Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, the freshly divorced protagonist of ‘After Nicolette’ similarly feels enlivened after an evening of unexpected flirtation and connection. Alone in their hotel room, they consummate a new relationship to themself, imagining a full moon bursting ‘into infinite glittering constellations that sear so bright on the inside of [their] eyelids’ as they ‘[c]autiously, curiously’ ride self-generated ‘waves of pleasure.’ 

Driven by curiosity and the pursuit of bodily pleasure, characters demonstrate, through playing with themselves, that sex—whether solo, partnered or in a group— can be a creative space of play. The diversity of ways in which the authors who contribute to Secret Sex take up the task of writing about this taboo topic reflects the degree to which both fiction and sex can be generative spaces of imagination. Pervatory’s narrator, Martin, gestures to this same idea when he remarks at a ‘puppy-play party’ that although ‘all S/M is bad theatre,’ the scene around him is ‘bad improv, open-stage night at the Second City.’ Production quality aside, his references to theatre and improv emphasize the capacity for cultivating play that resides within the sphere of sex. In their anonymity, the writers responsible for Secret Sex have space to play freely with words and narrative as they produce a set of stories that are fun, poignant and bold.

—Avery Qurashi