Customer Reviews

A Disturbance in One Place: A Novel

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I absolutely loved this wonderfully emotional and somewhat dark story of a young Jewish New Yorker, who is exploring her world through friendship,love and lust. She is so confident, but can not understand herself at times. She is loving and heartless. She is a chameleon, but a sincere one... It's not your average erotic fiction. There is a lot to think about after reading it.

I adore the narrator of this book. True, in some ways, she's lonely and feels like an outsider, but then, this is America, who doesn't feel this way, at least 50% of the time. I love the narrator because she is so smooth, such a great player, and even though her intent is not to play people, the men in her life sometimes feel played anyway, but more because they are playng themselves. She has a husband, two lovers, and a love of her life who compares her to a garden-variety snake, "A brief chase and you're easily enough caught. Still, you'll never get warmer than room temperature." This is not to say she's not a hotty in bed, it's just emotionally, she doesn't get sucked into faux-love based on good or bad sex or the loneliness of others. She just does exactly what she wants to, perfectly unconcerned about conventional morality. Clearly, Kirshenbaum has a profound understanding of men and more disturbingly, the human condition. Though the narrator, herself, realizes fulfullment cannot be achieved by collecting lovers--there is no suggestion that there is any better way, either. Ultimately, the implication is not that there's something wrong with the narrator, but rather, that ultimately, life is lonely and there is no cure--only treatments.
Kirshenbaum often deals with the theme of profound loneliness, but like Conrad, she offers no solutions. She offers it as a condition of life, and for those who would pass judgment on the narrator's lifestyle, ultimately she reveals herself not as a "puttanta" but as a Christ- figure, suffering the loneliness of the world. Fantastic book.

Binnie Kirshenbaum's highly sexed novel, "A Disturbance in One Place" (New York, 1994) takes it's title from its epigraph, a quotation from "The Brothers Karamazov": "all things flow and touch each other; a disturbance in one place is felt at the other end of the world."

Virtually all the disturbances take place in one setting, the bed where the narrator, a Jewish housewife I'll call Mrs. Goodhead - she is unnamed in the book -- finds herself at the moment. More often than not these encounters begin with Mrs. Goodhead performing zip-a-dee-do-dah oral sex and go on from there. The book can not be said to be plot driven, it's sex driven: Mrs.Goodhead in overdrive.

It is less clear where the disturbances at the other end of the world take place. But some clues are suggested, although not always what you might expect. For example, her husband seems to accept his wife's nonstop philandering without curiosity or any qualms. How likely is that?

If you like sex, you will enjoy this book. It's good dirty fun. For my money, it is a better read that Nicholson Baker's much ballyhooed, but ultimately boring, new pornutopian fantasy, "House of Holes". That said, you are free to ask, is there more to "A Disturbance" than the sex. Not a great deal. Its strength lies in the narrator's engaging candor about her proclivities. And by the third and last section of the book, Mrs. Goodhead starts to sense that there may be more to life than a rousing orgasm and home cooked Osso Buco. (This in a chapter titled "From Inside the Bone.") Still and all, her dawning self-awareness comes too late to offset the impression that all she really wants from life is a good roll (role?) in the hay.

Endnote. In "On Mermaid Avenue" Kirshenbaum's 1993 novel about two amorous co-eds, Monarose, the more sexually experienced, uses a banana to demonstrate to her friend Edie how to give good head. When Edie doesn't catch on right away, Monarose tells her not to worry, "It's taken me three weeks and four boys to master..." For more detailed guidance on the way to perform this practice see "Sex Tips for Girls," Cynthia Heimel's best selling manual. (New York, 1983).

Perhaps the mistake I made was basing my expectations of this book upon the ratings and reviews and others. I think I may have expected too much from this book. Though it kept my interest and I enjoyed the perspective of adultery we get from the protaginst, I felt there was something missing in her and the story as a whole. By the time I finished the book, I was left needing more than the story and main character gave.

What can I say? This book is as close to perfect as anything I've read in a long time. This is the most in depth, complex, well written novel dealing with female sexuality and emotional isolation that I have ever read. Ever. Every time I think about this book I want to read it again, immediately.

What a read! A Disturbance in One Place is hysterically funny-and yet, an abyss opens up underneath almost every sentence. This novel is profound without any of the pretense so often found in "literary novels." It is hugely entertaining, sexy, and seemingly carefree, but at the same time expresses a loneliness and self-destruction that is heartbreaking and leaves a longing that can't be filled by stock answers. In short, the book is also refreshingly politically incorrect. Norman Mailer, not known for his sensitive ear for "women's lit," praised the book for its "candor, lack of self-protection, and humor." Right on!

Both lyrical and sensitive this book has a whole new outlook on adultery and its motives!A must for all husbands who wonder what their wives are doing in their afternoons.