Nicholson Baker, The Fermata
No other writer has evinced so contradictory a response in me. Within the space of a single page I lurch from love to loathing, vacillating between an enraptured appreciation of joyous (and occasionally Joycean) wordplay (to wit: ‘literoti’, ‘prelewds’, ‘floptical jillusions’), and a heaving convulsion of disgusted contempt – at ludicrous accounts of covert cumshots, pubic topiaries resembling bicycle seats, extra-terrestrial bondage fantasies actualised in enormous electromagnetic contraptions. The morally repugnant and the downright ineffable are paraded about like Mardi Gras floats. No issue is too picayune to escape his unflinching scrutiny or his neurotic fixations. His writing is, I think, knowingly festooned with outrageous coinages. On the surface, such expression is indefensible, as far as delicacy, restraint or ‘artistic license’ is concerned. He is always brazen and unnerving, and also frequently absurd. With such characteristic phrases as ‘scream-cream’ and ‘burning bechamel’, he celebrates the lurid lexicon of pornography, tapping its bawdily comic, but also candidly sensuous, potential with such playful glee that even our soundest objections are coaxed into a helpless admiration of the beguiling qualities of his language.

It is, of course, extremely erudite pornography, with a keen sense of parody, and what Woolf called the ‘sublimely obscene’. At one point he chides Borges for a disappointingly unimaginative treatment of the proposition of temporal stasis in his story, The Secret Miracle. NB turns the whole premise of magic-fabulism and metaphysical speculation on its head, spurning the heavy-handedness to which the genre is prone, and fully mining it for the wild, questing, almost picaresque adventurism it implicitly entails.

(Niggling thought: why Lolita, so tenderly insinuating and tantalisingly tacit, was received the way it was, while this flagrant exhibition of sexual bravado and perversion met with unqualified praise, is quite baffling to me.)