Prof Meets Cop

In the Cut a novel by Susanna Moore.  Random House.  *****

The end of this novel is so startling—and so nervy on the part of the author—that I almost couldn’t believe it.  It’s one of those books where you think you’re missing the final pages, they’ve been ripped out (which is tough when you’re reading the Kindle edition).  Then you realize: no, this is the end.  This is it.

I thought it was brilliant.  I would almost say you should read it for the ending alone.

Frannie is a creative writing teacher in Manhattan, in the neighborhood of Washington Square.  She has a particular interest in the use of language, especially idiomatic speech, especially ungrammatical or mistaken idioms.  I share that fascination.  The title of this novel, for instance, means someplace safe, free from harm.  And she’s “always on the lookout for words that are incorrectly rendered” but “have an onomatopoetic logic, as well as a kind of poetry. . . . For example, Old Timer’s Disease, rather than Alzheimer’s.  Abominal for stomach.  Athletic fit for epileptic fit.  Chicken pops.  Very close veins.  The prostrate gland.”[1]

At the beginning of the novel she goes to a bar with one of her students (something I wouldn’t have thought of doing when I taught), an African American named Cornelius.  While there she walks down some stairs looking for a bathroom and opens a door on a woman giving a man a blow job.  They’re in the shadows, and she can barely see them; she’s not sure whether the man sees her.  She watches the act with a critical eye, as if she’s a connoisseur.  By the time she goes upstairs Cornelius is gone.

A few days later a police detective named Malloy shows up at her apartment with the news that there was a particularly gruesome murder in the neighborhood and wondering if she’d seen anything; the bartender identified her as somebody who was in the bar where the victim was seen.  Noting a tattoo, Frannie has a strong suspicion that Molloy was the guy getting the blow job.  Apparently the woman giving it was the one who was killed.

Years ago my brother said to me that he had never read an explicitly sexual novel that told in detail how a woman feels during the sexual act.  He read Fear of Flying in hopes of finding that, but discovered that that famous novel never quite gets explicit; what is startling in that book is the narrator’s wiseass attitude.  In the Cut is the book my brother was looking for.  I can’t think of another novel by a woman that is so explicit and detailed in describing the sexual act.

Frannie is an anomaly.  She really is genuine scholar, about a rather arcane subject, but is also adventurous, sexually and otherwise.  When Malloy takes her to the squad car to meet his partner, Ritchie Rodriguez, she’s positively flirtatious, which seemed inappropriate not just because they’re cops but because they’re investigating a murder.  She’s attracted to these men partly just because they inhabit a world so much different from hers, where they use the kind of slang she’s studying and speak of women in a rough casual way.  She likes them for their overt manliness.  She soon starts a relationship with Malloy that is strictly sexual.  No one’s in love here, or emotionally involved.  They’re doing it because it’s exciting.

The book was published in 1995, and it seems to portray a New York of an earlier time, when there was lots of crime in the streets and the city had an air of menace.  Nevertheless, Frannie walks blocks at night to see her friend Pauline, who lives above a topless bar called the Pussy Cat, and they not only meet in Pauline’s apartment but sometimes have a drink in the bar.  I haven’t spent much time at topless bars, but hadn’t figured women would hang out there.  Pauline is as adventurous as Frannie, and they egg each other on.  Malloy keeps investigating because the grisly murders keep happening, with people being disarticulated (a word Frannie likes) in a particular way.  And then, at the end of the book—as we’ve been expecting—the murders get close to home.

I loved the writing in this book, the description of what seems to me an old New York, and the incredibly explicit and inventive sex.  If there was anything that struck me as slightly false, it was the way Malloy and Frannie were so sexually inventive and perfect with each other right from the start, nobody missing a beat.  But even for someone who’s read a lot of such writing, the sex scenes are startling.  Frannie seems like a woman of my generation, who came of age when women wanted to be independent and sexually autonomous.  I admired the writing and liked the character.

I read this novel because of an answer Olivia Lang gave in the By the Book section of the Times, when asked what was the last great book she had read.  “In the Cut  by Susanna Moore,” she said.  “Vicious, idiosyncratic, stylish, erotic, frightening. It’s a noirish feminist thriller about a woman who witnesses a murder. Up there with the great New York novels.”

She witnesses a blow job, not a murder, but let’s not get picky.  I’d rank it with the great New York novels too.  And it has an ending I suspect I’ll never forget.  Even if I get Old Timer’s Disease.

[1] She neglects to mention being prostate with grief.