FOR ABOUT the first third of Genevieve, it seems that Eric Jerome Dickey's first name should be 'Erect' (you know, like how the '...aica' on Damian 'Jr. Gong' Marley's album is crossed off and replaced with '...rock').
On a journey of discovery from the big bad LA into his wife's very secret small town past (she is like the Count of Monte Cristo, but from Odenville, with curves and a PhD.) before she sat in front of him at a speed dating affair, he (cause his name is damned hard to find in the book) manages to see sex in just about every situation.
First, there is remembered sex around his mother, of all persons, on the day that they have a fatal (in the very long run) crash on the highway. The boy says "don't cry, Momma" and she responds:
"He's gone... with that... and... and I'm buying... goddamn toys... like I am some sort of a... w...."
Then there is a skid and something goes bang.
Then there is imagined sex on the aeroplane, with the flight attendant:
"She yawns, her mouth wide, her eyes tight, as if she were willing to give and receive. In that istant I imagine her in the shadows, on her knees... pleasing me to the point of orgasm, then when my legs start to stiffen, when my eyes tighten and breathing shortens and my moans rise..."
NASTY CONFLICT
Then there is a pretty nasty conflict with Genevieve (not Gen. Not Vee. Not 'JEH-neh-veev', but only and always 'ZHAWN-vee-EVH', as is made clear from very early) immediately after.
Off the plane and into the hotel, there is (you guessed it) sex again, this time a feely four in the hotel lobby:
COMPLICATION
Once again, though, there is complication with Dickey's erotica, as ..... thinks "I envy them, wish I could bottle their intensity and bathe my wife in their passion."
Then, finally, there is the first tingling encounter with the woman who he actually makes love to ("she whispers things to arouse me even more, growls, ...in the opening pages of Genevieve, as his wife is in the hotel lobby checking in:
"Where is your wife?" I swallow, resisting an urge to look behind me. "Around the corner, checking us in." She almost smiles. "You're bold." "I haven't done anything bold." "Too bad." "Why?" "With my mood, as long and tall and cute as you are, I might've done something bold."
And this is a conversation with a woman wearing a T-Shirt cut to stop right below her breasts.
SEX AND MORE SEX
So by now you should have figured out a couple things, other than that Erect... cho, I mean Eric Dickey likes to write about sex and he does it well. That after, before and during sex there are always complications and he is not an absolutely happy camper (the wedded two eventually get around to getting toget-her, but you know there is something wrong when a man is making love to his wife and "I watch her face, watch all the porn star faces she makes, listen to all her dramatic moans, sounds that sound more manufactured than spontaneous ..."). Plus, although the book is entitled Genevieve and it is about her, it is told through her husband's eyes and while he is delving into her past and busy unraveling her secrets, she already has his in the bag.
VOLUMINOUS SEX
It is a stunner when it comes. So is hers, actually. So is the identity of Miss ''I'm a screaming orgasm waiting to happen'. Put it this way; she is related to Genevieve, but she is not her sister as is said in the opening pages.
The sex is voluminous, vigorous and vociferous, but part of a good tale that Dickey tells well (trust me, the two do not always go together). Genevieve the woman is a person who flow charts her life (sex scheduling, for crying out loud), but it begins in her young adulthood. A phone call from an Uncle Fred is the first step to a man seeing his wife before she was miraculously reborn at about 18 and it is a painful journey (anal sex included), down South of the USA, no less, filled with abuse, racial tension, recriminations, testy testosterone and regrets.
AIDS
And, on his side, there is the real four letter word, AIDS, and the real reason why he chose that field to do research in.
The sex does not stop abruptly when they get to Odenville for the funeral of Willie Esther Savage (no blood relation to the Tanya Batson-Savage who writes for The Gleaner, but disposition now ...), but it does get a bit more focused and is woven into the unraveling of just who Genevieve is.
The book is current enough to have references to the Scott Petersen murder trial and the war in Iraq and Jamaica (not Jamrock) gets a mention as one of the places that Genevieve has visited.
Dickey can write (so OK, he should, 'cause the blurb introduces him as the six-time New York Times bestselling author of 'Drive Me Crazy') really write, and when he turns a line like "my own voice surprises me. It's strained. Somewhere between my heart and my lips most of my voice has evaporated" you have to say yeahhh. Or try this for size (pun intended): "if masturbation is an art, then I am Renoir."
SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT
Then there is this description of 'them' that Genevieve is not a part of, a bit before he realises for the first time that his wife began her life as LaKeisha Shauna Smith, courtesy of a phone call from Uncle Fred:
"She is not one of them. Not cut from the same cloth of people who name their children after cars and perfumes and possessions they cannot afford, or have a home filled with bastard children, each of those bastard children named after drugs the parents were addicted to at the time. She is not one of the people who took a simple name and bastardised its simplistic spelling to the point that it looked ridiculous on paper and sounded ludicrous as it rolled off the tongue, then pretended the name was that of an unknown king or queen, its origin rooted in Mother Africa." Chew on that one.
Along the journey to Genevieve's and his moments of truth in one searing moment, we meet people like Uncle Bubba, Jimmy Lee, Deuce, Uncle Fred and assorted rather dysfunctional characters. And when the past is literally and figuratively incinerated, you realise that Dickey does, after all, have a heart.
