Synopsis:
A dissection of hook-up culture on college campuses and in high schools, including anecdotal accounts.
Review:
More hand-wringing than Last Night in Paradise, less high-minded than Unprotected, Unhooked is more likely than either to provoke fear and consternation in the hearts of parents of teenagers across America–particularly if they’ve read I Am Charlotte Simmons and their daughter is looking at Duke University. Continue reading
Synopsis:
A look at sexual mores in the age of AIDS.
Review:
I like a good polemic as much as the next person, particularly when it involves people having lots of sex, mostly because I always feel like that’s nice work if you can get it. Last Night in Paradise isn’t hard-hitting investigative journalism as much as it’s an apologia for all the sex that Roiphe and her friends had in the 80s and 90s: “look, we may have slept around but we are always scared we got AIDS, so that doesn’t make us sleazy like swingers in the 1970s.” Roiphe herself calls this a kind of Puritanism, yet she succumbs to it in almost every chapter, talking about how she herself worries that she’s slept with too many people, or wondering whether or not she and her friends can handle the emotional ramifications of all that “safer sex.” She never quite seems to leave the Upper East Side private school world that she herself came from, and tends to see her experiences as representative of the general population. Her astonishment that anyone would voluntarily choose abstinence belies her inability to consider that there are other perspectives on sex than her own. Continue reading
Synopsis:
A troubled, introspective young woman in college in the early 60s falls out of favor with her sorority sisters and into a troubled relationship with a black PhD candidate in philosophy.
Review:
Very typical Oates–claustrophobic first-person narrative from the POV of a woman with serious issues. The story is laced with philosophical arguments that are way less interesting than the arcana of sorority life. Once Anellia leaves the Kappa house, the book loses contact with the larger world, narrowing in on Anellia and Vernor’s twisted pseudo-love affair. Oates does such a good job of limning the world of pretty girls in pouffy dresses swilling beer with oafish boys that I missed them when they left the story. Continue reading
