Hope

As recent events have shown, talking about sex has become no less banal than not talking about it. This is a lesson that Gabriel Jones, the 20-something British slacker-type narrator of Duncan's first novel, would do well to have learned. Gabriel's lust for pornography drives him out of the arms of his first love, Alicia, and into those of Hope, nom de guerre of the superprostitute who lets him act out his most-repressed fantasies. Duncan presents the guilt-ridden Gabriel's story in a series of nicely constructed, fragmentary mea culpas. Unfortunately, the moment that Gabriel's confessions build towards is a double childhood trauma that makes the novel as preachily predictable and flat as any allegory. The staccato and brutal language of pornography has so penetrated Gabriel's vocabulary that he uses the most vulgar terms of common vernacular for sexual parts and congress. The result is that even what he understands as love reads as just another kind of stunted male fantasy. The novel's major flaw is that Gabriel never finds the words to express his conflict between love and lust in terms as interesting as his astute remarks on pornography. (June)