Excellence takes many forms

The other books by Baker that I've read are The Mezzanine and Checkpoint. These three are all extremely different, which is a mark in his favor (even if I'd like to read a bunch of Mezzaninelikes).

This one's a "book of raunch" about a magical place, the House of Holes, that you can go to in various hole-related ways, like crawling into a clothes dryer, shrinking down and falling into a drinking straw, that kind of thing. People there play out sexual fantasies, most of which are on the themes of either a man getting to have sex with lots of women, or a woman getting to have sex with lots of men. The chapters switch between characters, only some of whom repeat, in a way that made them feel almost like linked short stories.

Also, the writing is deliberately ridiculous:

He'd walk in front of them holding his generous kindly forgiving dick, saying "Do you want this ham steak of a Dr. Dick that's so stuffed with spunk that I'm ready to blow this swollen sackload all over you?" And they'd all say, "Yes, Mr. Fuckwizard, we want that fully spunkloaded meatloaf of a ham steak of a dick."

I found it fun but not especially arousing, which I suppose is why it's a book of raunch instead of erotica. The piece that came closest to doing something for me was a story where a man meets a woman and wants to have sex with her, but she's married, and this must of course be respected. So she calls her husband to check with him, and he's angry at both of them about this. They solicitously ask about lots of specific things they might do, make some followup calls, keep going further with each other... it's conveyed very amusingly.

"Hon, I'm out on the back deck with Cardell, that's his name, and I've been explaining to him how you and I make love. I know, I know, hon, I know. But he's gotten a little aroused, the poor boy, as I have, and I wondered if it would be all right if he took out his dick and played with it, just for a moment or two, in a tasteful way, while I continued to tell him about us and what we do, so I thought I should ask you—" She listened for a moment. "Okay, no, I understand. Okay." She clicked the phone off. "He says no. But!" She got a shrewd expression. "He didn't say you couldn't do what you need to do in your bathing suit." "You mean reach in?" "Precisely. Reach in. Just don't 'bring it out.'"

That story takes place near, but not at, the House of Holes, which may say something about my tastes.

I picked this up in a local bookstore on a whim, because I was curious to see what successfully parlaying Twitter shitposting into mainstream literary fiction cred looks like.

It's written as autofiction with lots of space between paragraphs. I gather a lot of people are sick of at this point, but I don't come across a lot of books in that format myself, so I didn't mind. And it works quite well for conveying the feeling of spending way too much time on Twitter, which is what the first half of the book is pretty much entirely about.

The main character got Internet-famous by tweeting "Can a dog be twins?", which feels plausible enough to me. There are references to a bunch of flash-in-the-pan controversies that I vaguely remember, like the time everyone got upset about the New York Times recommending peas in guacamole. I don't know, it's all about giving a vibe, but the effect worked for me.

The second-half switch into focusing on her baby niece's health problems, less so. The format's still the same in that half, which made it hard (for me) for it to read as profound. It's very deliberate that it's still told in fragments with lots of section breaks, of course, since it's about what it's like to deal with a serious family tragedy as an Internet-poisoned person, but it felt like that capped how much I could get out of it.

I'd heard good things about Iris Murdoch from Tumblr people. I hadn't realized her books were about strange cuckolding situations, but maybe I should have guessed that.

Good focus on the main character's internal life. I like how he spends so much narration reflecting deeply about his emotions and what the changing relationships between everyone feel like, how things seem to be changing, and despite that is consistently blindsided by every new development.

Major spoilers follow: