Angelica's Grotto by Russell Hoban

He went to where Pesage Noir hung and stood before it. 'The strangeness of things,' he said to Redon -- 'I know it was always in your mind and it's always with me too; I used to think of it as a question that had no answer but now it seems to me that it's an answer for which no one can imagine the question. The world is full of strange answers and missing questions; each of us is an answer to some unknown question that we have to guess at and get wrong as often as not. Right now I'm the answer to the question, "Who will play Old Fool in a geriatric sex-farce?'"

Harold Klein is a 72-year old art critic, twice widowed, in poor health. Besides bouts of angina he's recently lost his "inner voice"--that unregulated part of ourselves that our conscious brain filters before speaking. He finds himself saying things without thinking, and getting himself punched in the face for it. He's shuffled from one psychiatrist to another, but he finds himself looking elsewhere to soothe his psyche: a porno website called Angelica's Grotto, where not only can you browse photographs of women engaged in sexual acts of all stripes, but chat with Angelica herself. Klein strikes up a relationship with Angelica--who turns out to be a sex researcher with the ridiculous name of Melissa Bottomley--insinuating himself into her life and her research.

I think a novel like Angelica's Grotto would be a hard sell for a lot of contemporary readers. There are few topics I think people are less apt to find interesting in 2021 than the sexual proclivities of old men. When Klein meets Melissa for the first time and she puts her tongue in his mouth, it's hard not to roll your eyes. Oh, you might find yourself saying, as I did, this is just another one of those books by an old writer who wants to bed young women. But what happens after that doesn't fit quite neatly into idea of the novel as wish-fulfillment, or if it does, it does so in an especially candid way: Melissa whips out a strap-on and sodomizes the less-than-willing Klein. In doing so, she compels Klein to undergo what thrilled him so much in the photographs that enthralled him.

Angelica's Grotto is filled with those Hoban-like details: lots of references, perhaps too many, to cultural and artistic artifacts, from Expressionist painter Odilon Redon to Orlando Furioso to the band Garbage. In Hoban's novels, these artifacts, especially paintings, tend to take on a kind of anthropomorphic quality, manifesting as strange physical presences. Klein intends to sell his priceless Redon to fund Melissa's research, hoping perhaps to exchange the representation of the id on the wall for mastery over the real thing. The id, that inner voice, Klein begins to associate with the Sumerian god Oannes, a half-man, half-fish who existed before forms were made but who carries with him the world's wisdom. Angelica's Grotto is an exploration of how the sex drive, too, is an expression of that inner voice, a part of ourselves which we can filter, but neither control nor understand.