Eat Me

The exuberant sex scenes in this bestselling work of erotica from Australia demand dog-earing: outrageous and imaginative, they are also graphically convincing. But Jaivin fills the lulls with self-consciously timely dialogue that panders to a hot-button treatment of sexuality and sexual politics. The ensemble cast of four hip women in their 30s tend to talk in sound bites about the beauty myth or the comparative merits in men of brain and brawn. They use words like ""empowerment"" when trying to decipher the political implications of, say, sticking a cucumber in a man's anus. Chantal is a fashion editor, Julia a freelance photographer, Helen a feminist university lecturer and Philippa a writer of a novel-in-progress called Eat Me. They recount their own sexual adventures and imaginatively entangle themselves in one another's exploits. On their real and fantasy plates they find a 22-year-old musician, a virginal student, a trucker, a Chinese snake charmer, a black gigolo, Rambo, a slave girl and an occasional grape. They are all supposed to be smart, liberated and unrepressed. As for Jaivin, her first novel is much smarter when she throws her characters into bed (or a truck or a supermarket aisle) than when she makes them try to understand the meaning of what they do in any of those venues. This is, really, classic pornography in the 18th-century French manner. It's plain dirty fun that, winking and nodding (and leering), makes a halfhearted show of donning a philosopher's wig. $50,000 ad/promo; foreign rights sold in Germany, Italy, Brazil, Holland, Israel, Spain; author tour. (July)