Customer Reviews

Kink: A Novel

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is one of the most interesting I've ever read. It is somewhat satirical and looks at the frailties of human relationships.Jess, the narrator is an ordinary guy in a very unusual situation. He's in love with two women and must struggle both with his own psyche and selfish drives and the manipulitiveness of both women. This is a book about selfishness and it's consequences. It's not so much a plot-based book as a fascinating study of human relationships. Both dark and humorous at times and always intelligent and insightful. In summary, I loved it. Highly reccomended,

Kathe Koja ranges across a variety of styles and genres. Although a writer of rare ability, she seems, at times, to be more interested in word play than in telling a story. This is not always a bad thing, but it has to be handled delicately. It is far too easy to lose your readers as they wend their way through the author's maze of words and phrases. So it is with "Kink", Ms. Koja's latest novel. At its heart, the novel is about the love triangle between two women and one man. Told through the eyes of the man, it explores his disintegration and subsequent redemption. This emotional fall and rise mirrors the menage a trois' evolution and destruction. It is at once sad and poignant. However, Ms. Koja's use of language continually disrupts the reader. The author has chosen to relate the story in a stream of consciousness style that requires the reader to follow the often turbulent thought processes of the narrator, Jess. Not only does this style grow tiresome, it deprives the reader of relating to the other main characters. Viewed as they are through the prism of Jess' perceptions, they come across as flat and one-dimensional. Sophie, Jess' lover at the beginning of the book, suffers the most from this. The reader never understands her motivations. Jess' inability to communicate with Sophie effectively shuts out the reader as well. As a consequence, a character that could have added needed depth and complexity remains largely tangential, although she is integral to much of the plot. Ms. Koja is a fine author who is certain to gain a wider audience. One only hopes her next novel improves on the promise she shows us in "Kink"

Kathe Koja, Kink (Henry Holt, 1996)

Kathe Koja's fifth novel, and her last (to date) book for adults, came and went in the blink of an eye. Published by a relatively obscure publisher (Henry Holt normally does textbooks and obscure "literary" fiction) rather than her native Dell, given next to no publicity, and allowed to languish, Kink fell into obscurity within a few months of its publication date. I first ran across word Koja had published a fifth novel two months after its release; when I tried to order a copy, Borders was unable to get it. It had already gone out of print. It has never, to my knowledge, been released in paperback.

To call this an abomination, a crime against nature, would perhaps be understating the case. Koja is one of a handful of writers who regularly compete for the title of America's finest living person of letters. Kink, coming after the two perfect novels Skin and Strange Angels, could only be a letdown, right? If it went out of print THAT fast?

Of course not, fool.

Kink is, as any fan of Koja's is probably happy to hear, a work of brilliance just as blinding and extreme as Strange Angels (or Straydog, the book that came afterwards, with six long years between the two). It is not, like her previous novels, horror. Unlike the others, it doesn't even pretend to be. Kink is human drama, pure and simple. The mysterious, ethereal characters who have peppered her work from the beginning of here career are here exposed as pathetic, degenerates for the sake of degeneracy, living in their own little worlds carved out of the fabric of reality, existing only to hover around Koja's main characters like moths drawn to a bug zapper.

In this case, the main characters are three: Jess and Sophie, the young couple in love, meet Lena, the alluring loner. Through a string of events that seem random to Jess, who narrates, Lena ends up moving in, and well, the inevitable occurs.

Three-way relationships, be they [adult relations] or platonic, are the most fragile of delicacies. The ability to manipulate the balance of power within one to one's own ends, whatever they may be, are endless. Ultimately, that's what Kink is about; the rest of the world (including the novel's readership) is clearly capable of seeing this from the get-go, while Jess is too thick-headed to get it. (The comments of many of the book's reviewers make me think that, while they get that Jess is too thickheaded to see what's going on, don't buy how easy it is to manipulate others in such a situation. Trust me. The realism here goes well above and beyond that to be found in Skin or Strange Angels.) Jess' inability to see what's going on around him is relatively understandable, as he's blinded by both his love for Sophie and his passion for Lena; he does make some hall-of-fame-worthy stupid moves at various times, which to be fair have to be rationalized away. Eventually, the book does move out of the world of the [physical relations] dynamic and back into the world of the pathetic losers I talked about at the start, a world Jess is now very familiar with, and the book sets up a mystery about one of Lena's old flames (with a sucker punch at the end that caps the book off perfectly) that continues the interest far beyond anything reasonable.

Kink is a novel about obsession. I get the feeling that the more of an obsessive personality you are as a reader, the more you'll get out of it. I can say with almost certainty that if you've been in a three-way relationship that went horribly, fatal-car-accident-scale wrong and stayed that way for a period of time, you're going to end up revering this book. Koja fans who have been hunting it down since its release will also not be disappointed. The rest of the world, well, recent research has led me to believe they just won't get it.

Kink is not as good as Strange Angels, but in the same way Skin is not as good as Strange Angels; the three of them (along with Straydog, but it being part of the "new phase" of Koja's work I probably shouldn't count it) form a triumvirate that could stand as a how-to guide for writers of fiction who want to deal in well-drawn characters, dark plots, and existential decay. Strange Angels, as I have often said, is one of the three or four best novels in the English language; "not as good" means Skin and Kink fall somewhere in the top, say, twenty-five. Whatever possessed Henry Holt to publish this I have no idea, but I just went back over my last five years of reading, and whatever it is, I hope it stays at Holt. It is by far the finest novel they ever produced that came across my desk. *****

Rather than a standard review, I'll offer this, the reaction I had - what I wrote down - immediately after reading it...

"Line after line scrolls past his eyes, phosphors glittering -- meaningless, and full of everything -- endless and horribly finite in the cosmic expanse of existence. He is alone -- she gone to the store/park/friends house, all the same -- endless and absent. What is real is imprinted on the pages before him; what matters is dredged from past days, lost times and half-lived moments that cannot be reclaimed. All against the backdrop of alone -- in synch with the knowledge that she is not present, and he is too far gone not to think thoughts that will bring back the ghosts.
Others walk the columns/lines/words that blur into his past. He can't rip himself free of their embrace, can't stop them from claiming him and dragging him inward -- onward. Pain blossoms, echoes of other times, other lines that were his, and hers -- a different her -- also gone. Turn the page.

Wrong steps -- roads leading to despair known but impossible to dodge, because it is not he on the page but his memory, not under control, but controlling, and there is no escape except through. Through places/things/times where he never wanted to go again, where he has always been -- through with this, through that -- all the same emptiness; all the same pain without relief, never defeated, only buried and now dredged to the surface by pen and ink and psyche . . . laid bare against the backdrop of time, past/present blurred-- the same."

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Well...I guess I would say that I like this book. In fact it seemed amusing and humorous to me how incredibly inane Jess (the main character) was. There are moments where he seems on the verge of total stupidity and other times he just seems like your ordinary average clutz. Other than that, the characters seem pretty well drawn out. The plot gets confusing with what reminded of Kafka's writings. It's not a noir mystery, but somehow it carries just as stark an atmosphere as it deals with the little menage a trois that goes on in the story. Very interesting to say the least, but the story is confusing enough to make one want to read it again. Not that it would help...I'm still trying to figure some things out about it...I do like it though. Very visceral and a good read if you want something different.

I went through three stages while reading "Kink". The first was, "Why is this guy so stupid?" The book is written from the point of view of the man in a three-way relationship and he does the dumbest things. This isn't a case of, "You're in a three-way, dummy, it doesn't get any better so quit complaining." No, he just does dumb things. I chalk it up to the book being written by a woman. I mean, a woman writing from a man's point of view is as difficult as a man writing from a woman's point of view. Difficult but not impossible and the author doesn't pull it off.

The second phase was, "Get on with it." I'm not familiar with author Koja's works but this book is wordy. It's entertaining at the beginning of the book but it grates after a while. I found myself searching for quotation marks which signalled that the book was moving forward.

The third phase was, "I have to find out how this ends--quickly." It was a good story, just poorly executed (if it was a movie I would have written, "Good story, bad script."). Because of Koja's wordy style, I was able to quickly get through the last third of the book and find out what happened to the characters and not just to finish the book. I really wanted to find out what happened to these people. The author was successful in getting me to care about the characters. I just didn't care much for the book.