A blow by blow account

Rapture
by Susan Minot
Fourth Estate £12.99, pp116

Susan Minot's third book is 116 pages long, the time it takes her characters to perform a single act of fellatio. In America, Rapture has been received in terms that reflect its title, yet you can't help thinking its conceit makes a mockery of literary criticism and turns it into a more intimate set of qualms. 'If only there had been more variety,' you find yourself complaining.

Minot wrote the screenplay to Bernardo Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty - one of the worst films ever directed by a genius - in which the audience's time is spent waiting for Liv Tyler to lose her virginity. In Rapture you're waiting for similar results; in both cases the anticipated event is an anti-climax. The only difference is that here the wait is punctuated by a slight pain in the jaw.

Kay and Benjamin meet for lunch a year after their affair has ended. The relationship Benjamin was in at the time (with his fiancée, Vanessa) has also finished, but he still sees her from time to time. In fact, he is due to see Vanessa after lunch, though he doesn't tell Kay that. Kay finds that, far from wearing off, her love for Benjamin is stronger than ever. She doesn't tell him that. Both tell themselves they had no idea this was going to happen: they never for a moment thought they would end up in bed after a couple of innocent tomato sandwiches in her apartment.

Minot is brilliant at mapping out this game of occlusion and denial, of showing how two bodies so close together can hold such wildly divergent minds. There's a humdrum tragedy in the fact that neither of these people will ever know how far the other is from them, or how many moments of love they have lost. They've mismanaged their desire. Now, when Kay thinks things are just beginning, Benjamin feels it's all too late.

Benjamin and Kay met when she was working on his first feature film. Vanessa, who is wealthy, had put up with Benjamin's unemployment for years, and he'd lived in her flat. They'd been together for over a decade. Then, while shooting the film in Mexico, Benjamin fell for Kay, who never asked him to leave Vanessa, because in her view that decision had to come from him. As a result, it was never clear to Benjamin how reciprocal his feelings for Kay actually were, though you might think he could have guessed.

Benjamin was faced with a disingenuous dilemma. On the one hand he had Vanessa, a woman he no longer loved. On the other hand he had Kay, whom he loved madly. In the logic of his guilt-ridden mind the situation translates as this: he doesn't know what the future holds with Kay, whereas with Vanessa he knows he did love her once. Assuming there must be magical certainties where there are none, except for the feelings he is denying himself, he reflects on the two women: 'Who would anyone say was better to bank on?'

If only Minot weren't so attached to her literary conceit, which requires her to return to the activity in the bed with nullifying frequency, she might have written something simple and accurate about love. But she insists on turning a book into a blow-job, and this is where novella becomes farce, because language fails her. To spare slow readers the pain, I'll let this curtailed read speak for itself:

'God he was lovely. God he was sweet. God. God. God... Yes, it was starting again, the humming of the blood. She let it carry her. What was that Oscar Wilde quote?... She ran her fingers lower on him. She flicked him softly... Was this going to take her where she hoped to go?... He was getting closer. Was she gripping harder or was that him getting bigger?... She was creeping slowly to the centre of herself. He was the bridge she took to get there... Her mouth was battered. Everything around her was lifted and golden and electric... Her face flushed deeply... "That was worship," she said.'

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