‘Maidenhead’ by Tamara Faith Berger

Reviewed by Elizabeth Bricknell

‘Intellectual porn,’ which Maidenhead strives to be, is a tough nut to review. What distinguishes ‘good’ PornLit from ‘bad’? Titillation amidst a good, hopefully entertaining plot, I like to think.

The plot is there in Tamara Faith Berger’s third book, but in brief, our heroine gets a golden shower (pissed on) and savagely beaten in the first chapter and spends the rest of the novel rationalizing it and why she keeps coming back for worse.

Myra is a sixteen-year-old sex-obsessed virgin on vacation with her family in Key West, so we can’t blame it on Rio. “It was true that I was going to be the greatest lay in the world,” she says.

She meets a pervy Tanzanian rasta (this is mentioned so that she doesn’t have to say black because she is incredibly open-minded and non-judgmental). Elijah picks her up on the beach, takes her to his room, pees on her, she leaves, he calls her back with, “little bitch… come back, little bitch” which becomes her orgasm catchphrase. She gets bitch-slapped by his ladyfriend, Gayl. And Myra masturbates wildly in every bathroom stall the family encounters.

This time… I knew exactly what I was doing. I pulled up my skirt and used both my hands… Don’t run away, little bitch. Come back, little bitch… I felt it bigger inside me this time, coming like a parachute opening… Bitch. My mother couldn’t take it….

My family were waiting outside the museum for me in the sun.

When they return home, she remains a virgin, but can bring herself to orgasm just by squeezing her thighs together, and learns other party tricks when Elijah and Gayl show up in town, ostensibly to visit (with a camcorder). The bad pennies rent a room in Filmores Hotel (well-known in Toronto for headlining dwarf strippers and signage like: THE DOG DAYS OF SUMMER ARE HERE, SO WHY NOT COME IN AND CHASE A LITTLE PUSSY?) and Myra slips out and away from her family and fairly normal pothead boyfriend to visit Elijah and Gayl often. During these visits, our novel morphs into Last Tango in Filmores, but to give you a salacious tease, replace the butter with a flute and add a very cranky black woman: “His cock was my new talisman.”

Although the reader, at least this reader, learns to dread the sex scenes, scratch the surface (not too much now, or she’ll be spanking the cabbage in your bathroom stall) and there is a well-written coming-of-age story here. Her parents split up: her mother cheerily ESLs off to Korea*, her father has a quiet nervous breakdown; she falls out of favour with her friends; she starts drinking and smoking weed. All readers can relate to this. But for the second half of the book, the author concentrates on a make-it-or-break-it essay that Myra must write for school, where she attempts to justify her masochism:

My essay had evolved into thinking about fucking. You could be raped a thousand times and still be a virgin. I was writing about fucking by a master and fucking as a slave, about Hegel, the [Korean*n.b.] comfort women and teenage porno stars.

What if slaves could take pleasure when enslaved? Slavery, I proposed, needs to be re-thought from the contradictory knowledge and expression of shame.

To complicate this Stockholm Syndrome, Myra decides to use Hegel, a primarily political philosopher, as her Dr. Ruth. She gleans most of her information through Wikipedia and is not ashamed to say so. Back in the prehistoric days of handwritten term papers, there was no Internet and we had to struggle to make sense of Hegel and his charts, finally realizing that he didn’t understand himself. Sex was not his thing; autonomy was.

The author has her own fetish for driving home the fact that Myra is a very clever girl and she is. We don’t need Hegel to see that but we may need Freud and Prozac. I don’t know if she is the typical teens’ teen, with porn delivered to her inbox and ordered to her hotel room and an accompanying total desensitization to sex, but I sure hope not. The very thought of this made me throw the book across the room in fear that today’s young woman feels she must play the whore, complete with a landing strip and an anal bleach. Worse, today’s young virgin – what is her laundry list of psychological hangups?

Berger once made her living by writing conventional pornography but she underestimated her powers. She has the Judy Blume eye for sharp adolescent self-pity and misunderstandings. She can write acute characterizations, crackling dialogue and a realistic and addictive family dynamic. Ideally, Maidenhead would be the harbinger of a brilliant, Governor-General’s-winning fourth novel for Berger— one without an ass on the cover, which you could read on the subway unconcealed in a magazine.

Coach House | 160 pages |  $18.95 | paper | ISBN #978-1552452592