FIFTY SHADES OF SHADOW

In his proud anthem “Smut,” the great Tom Lehrer celebrates his love of:


“Smut!

Give me smut

And nothing but

A dirty novel I can’t shut

If it’s uncut

And unsubt-

-tle.”

Tom, have I got a book for you. There are many adjectives that might be applied to Steve Shadow’s debut tome Sin-ema, but “subtle” isn’t likely to be one of them.

This book is like a lost work by Henry Miller, if Henry Miller was a grammatically challenged 13-year-old trying to impress his friends at a sleepover. It’s really, really dirty; if the public were to take notice of it, it could set relations between the sexes back 50 years, and American literature back 200 years.

And yet…it’s kind of a good book.

It was given to me by a friend, with a request from the author for a review. I was flattered, because even though I myself, badly in need of money, once wrote a porn novel—it was serialized, under a pseudonym, in Playtime magazine many years ago—I’m no expert on the genre. I’m not a porn consumer, partly because I don’t need help to get distractingly turned on, and partly because…well, because at heart I’m a repressed, uptight Protestant, and porn embarrasses me.

But Shadow’s Sin-ema, though it certainly embarrassed me, also entertained me. It’s written with such adolescent exuberance that I couldn’t keep a smile off my face while reading it, and about once a page it cracked me up.

The story couldn’t be much simpler. The narrator gets a job managing an adult movie theater in Chicago in the early ‘70s. This leads to him having sex with lots of different people, in lots of different combinations. Things get out of hand. The end. Sorry I didn’t give you a spoiler alert.

Sin-ema’s sexual politics are decidedly and unapologetically from another generation, though it should be noted that at times the narrator seems to show at least some, well, personal growth in that regard. The prose style is a train wreck, or rather, a series of train wrecks—each one caused by the runaway locomotive of the author’s headlong narrative gusto.

And Shadow sure does like the word “sure.” Every two or three pages, at most, somebody “sure looked well rehearsed and hot to trot” or “sure had a nice body for an older woman” or “had sure come out her shell.” There’s an absurd boyish charm to this tic. But for pure literary magic, I don’t think that Shadow ever tops a turn of phrase in the very first paragraph, when the narrator describes one of his appendages being “knee-deep in her mouth.”

I found myself wondering by what scale of knee this was being measured—the narrator’s, or the appendage’s, if it had knees? This mental image alone was enough to make me glad I cracked Sin-ema.