GETTING IT ON

If you share “a belief in the hopefulness of sexuality,” this astonishing collection of some of the worst writing on the current scene, all of it about condoms, may be the book for you. A badly mismatched collection of 29 stories, poems, essays, and excerpts from famous books you—ve probably already read, it exhibits all of the narcissism, vapidity, and plain old ignorance that immediately spring to mind nowadays at the mere mention of “creative writing.” There are, first of all, the retreads (some of them pretty good) taken from works like T.C. Boyle’s “Modern Love” (a typical Boyleian fantasy involving a hypochondriacal girlfriend and a “full-body condom—); Armistead Maupin’s “Campmates” (about gay men “discovering” condoms in the early 1980s); John Irving’s teenaged sex scene from The World According to Garp; Martin Amis’s sexual reminiscences from The Rachel Papers; and Anne Rice’s very unsafe vampire sex from The Tale of the Body Thief. Then there are the poems, many of them silly or pretentious (—a Houdini risking / his life time and again / inside an airtight skin—). But the real discoveries are to be found in the “new” section, which includes such treats as Kim Addonizio’s “A Brief History of Condoms” (a pseudo-spoofing of academic prose); Cynthia Baughman’s “Safety Speech” (Cambridge graduate students examine the sexual politics of movie voice-overs); and Cathryn Alpert’s “Condomology in Twelve Easy Lessons” (a sort of top-twelve list of condom embarrassments). Nathan Englander’s “For the Relief of Unbearable Urges,” describing an Orthodox Jew who seeks outs prostitutes during his wife’s “unclean” periods, is one of the few stories of any interest. Pompous and/or foolish; about as pleasant and sensitive as—well, take a guess.