Ex Utero

In a dogged satire of sexual issues ranging from female infertility to arbitrary penile erection, this first novel presents the travails of Rita, who one night realizes she has lost her uterus at a shopping mall. A media circus soon envelops Rita when a Donahue-type figure named Rod Nodderman brings the story of the missing womb to the TV-watching public, encouraging sexual panic among viewers. The vagina of a woman named Adele seals itself shut in sympathy with wombless Rita; another Nodderman viewer named Lucy begins an interminable menstrual flow; male viewers sustain a perverse interest in the red high heels Rita wears on the air. Though Foos skillfully paces the story, her ostensible aim-a burlesque of sexuality's role in women's personal and political lives-loses its edge as the narrative, unlike its heroine, becomes fecund with extraneous motifs like tunafish and mysterious hemophiliacs. The symbols of bodily fragmentation in this odd tale are never made human; nor is their significance sufficiently clear, leaving the author's stylistically promising comic attempt a cold and unappetizing parable. (Apr.)