But how explicit does it really need to be? Walter Mosley’s Killing Johnny Fry

“I laughed. There I was, dick in hand, philosophizing about sexuality.”
Walter Mosley, Killing Johnny Fry

Walter Mosley’s Killing Johnny Fry is subtitled “A Sexistential Novel”, an appellation that will make the average reader either blush or chuckle. It’s tough to take graphic sex seriously. Hardcore scenes rarely make it into mainstream cinema or fiction, and when they do, they have a way of hogging the spotlight. Think, for instance, of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive – nary a conversation can be had about the film without at least mentioning the scene between Naomi Watts and Laura Ellen Harring, and indeed, the box office revenue generated by viewers who went mainly to see the two of them get it on is surely not negligible. Scenes of that nature, while popular in a way, are generally perceived as gratuitous. They are discussed with a kind of knowing smirk, as though everyone has agreed to pretend that there is artistic merit involved so that no one has to admit to enjoying pornography. And indeed, this notion isn’t always unreasonable – certainly, Nicole Kidman’s masturbation scene in Margot at the Wedding could be cut without any real harm to the film. Alternately, however, removing the sex scenes from A History of Violence would significantly detract from the movie’s subtle explorations of moral identity. While not instrumental to the plot per se, they serve as a fascinating counterpoint in the overall trajectory of the film, and carry a lot of weight in terms of character development. Much as we may believe that sex is an important part of our lives, and demand that art represent our everyday realities, sex is generally considered to be a private affair, extraneous to the story. If a movie or book is going to involve graphic sex, then there better be a good reason for it.

Walter Mosley doesn’t just use some sex scenes to spice up Killing Johnny Fry (as he arguably does in some of his other works, which are hardly lacking in steamy scenes) – sex is front and center in the novel. As Mosley puts it in the FAQ of the book’s webpage, “Cordell, the protagonist, is looking for meaning in his life (…) and the path that Cordell takes to find that meaning is the path of sexuality” (1). To put it more bluntly, Cordell finds himself in a kind of existential crisis, so he starts sleeping around. A lot.

As the novel opens Cordell Caramel is fighting his attraction to an attractive young woman and feeling vaguely guilty about a white lie he’s told Joelle, his partner of nine years. But just two pages later, he finds himself somewhat accidentally in Joelle’s apartment, watching her having sex with none other than Johnny Fry. And not just any kind of sex – primal, shocking, dirty-talking, deeply intimate sex. The woman he’s been doing it with in the missionary position once a week for 9 years (and occasionally doggy-style) is being sodomized by a white man and calling him Daddy. He leaves, unseen and in turmoil. Wandering around, he can’t stop replaying the scene in his mind, and discovers, to his surprise, that he has an erection. He finds himself in an adult video store where he strays past the “vanilla” section and acquires a hardcore DVD called The Myth of Sisypha. “I’d never bought a film like that before”, he tells us. “It’s not that I didn’t want to, but I was always too ashamed to bring something like that up to the cashier." So begins Cordell’s sexual odyssey.

He quickly moves from the virtual to the real, sleeping with the temptress from the opening pages, his neighbor, and a woman he encounters on the street. Simultaneously, he finds himself unable to leave Joelle, but instead keeps coming to her apartment and brutally possessing her. This opens an entirely new dimension of their relationship, as he begins satisfying needs she had never dared to express before. And Cordell finds himself amazed to discover this other side to the woman he loves, and to the world at large. This is the existential aspect to his discoveries – it’s not just new techniques to bring a woman to orgasm, it’s an awareness of another side to human interactions: “There was a hunger to her words. Before that early evening I might not have understood Linda Chou’s hankering. But now I’d seen it in Jo and Johnny, in Bettye and myself. I realized I’d gone through my whole life starving and never knew it. I was angry at Jo and Johnny, but the real source of pain for me was that I had never known how empty and unfulfilled my life was.” The poverty of his life lies in his complete ignorance of the power of his own, and others’ sexuality. By the end, he’s become a new man, empowered, self-assured, and able to form more meaningful and lasting relationships with other people. While this change doesn’t come about purely through sex, his various sexual encounters play a key role. Through them, he learns about himself and others, and gains an awareness of the world and his place in it. The novel ends on a hopeful note, but a curiously reserved one, implying that Cordell is indeed a changed man, but not a redeemed one – rather, he is now equipped to seek redemption, to begin anew, in a sense.

And how does the reader feel? Reviews of the text are all over the map. The sex seems to make it an all-or-nothing game – either you dismiss the text as porn, or you hail it as a brilliant exploration of the psyche. To some, the novel is just too much – too much sex, too much physicality. The “existential” aspect is lost in a sea of bodily fluids and the howls of anguished pleasure. To others, it’s an elegant and frank portrayal of sexuality and emotion, and particularly praiseworthy in its treatment of race and sexual identity (indeed, the novel plays with racial stereotypes in very interesting ways). What is at stake in these reviews, one senses, is the question of whether or not graphic sex is appropriate to serious fiction – if it isn’t, the book is panned, and if it is, it’s acclaimed, end of story.

To be sure, there are a few reviews that seek to evaluate the text on its own terms, without questioning whether or not the sex is appropriate in the first place. For these readers, the novel mostly falls short, particularly in its somewhat ham-fisted symbolism and in the female characters, who are admittedly clichés of the noir genre. To this, one might add that the book ends up so wrapped up in its own existential ponderings and narcissistic self-exploration that its ostensible centerpiece, the killing of Johnny Fry, seems completely tangential. These are valid critiques of the text, but at the same time, one wonders if they are perhaps missing the point.

Mosley is a curious writer in that he moves back and forth between mass market paperbacks (albeit of the finest quality) and more serious fiction. As one reviewer puts it, he is the “quintessential writer of holiday reads (…) his are books that you are not ashamed to be seen with at the airport, far more flattering to the intellect than the usual shiny paperbacks and far more likely to come home read than literary doorsteps by writers such as Thomas Pynchon” (2). To call Mosley a writer of “holiday reads” doesn’t do justice to the literary merit of his more serious offerings such as Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned or RL’s Dreams, but nonetheless, one would be surprised to see his name pop up on a short list for the Pulitzer. Killing Johnny Fry is not a literary masterpiece, and while contemplative in nature, it’s more on the mass-market side of the continuum of Mosley’s ouevre. Because of its sexual content, however, it ends up being held to a rather higher standard.

The issue here isn’t just sex, but the particular kind of sex in the novel – there are plenty of bodice-ripping romance novels out there, but the sex in this book is dark and kinky and generally taboo. While its acceptable to have a few racy scenes, if your protagonist is being penetrated by his next-door neighbor, then you’re either writing hardcore porn or high art, because there’s no space for that kind of sexuality in mainstream fiction.

And this is where the novel disappointed me. I appreciated Mosely’s attempt to take sex seriously. I enjoyed his willingness to push the envelope in terms of sexual norms. But ultimately, I found myself wishing that he’d showed some restraint, rather than turning it into an all-or-nothing, to the maxxx blowout. The novel would have been far more subversive, not to mention revolutionary, if Cordell had gone from being totally oblivious in the realm of sex to simply more open-minded and liberated, willing to try new things that may have seemed pretty wild to some readers, but not too far outside the pale. Instead, the text operates in extremes. The climax of the novel (literally!) features Cordell having a threesome in an underground New York sex club, powered by some bizarre super-drug, discovering the erotic potential of lactation. Quite a change from the mild-mannered guy at the book’s opening pages. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, necessarily, but it will undeniably alienate plenty of readers. Likewise, it turns out that Joelle’s desire for domination doesn’t end at an interest in the possibilities of power-play in sex, but includes a desire to be whipped, urinated on, and sodomized that is explicitly linked to a long history of sexual abuse. The next-door neighbor’s playful sexuality might have something to do with the incestuous relationship that she has with her brother. While there are some exceptions to the rule, for the most part any of the characters who choose to engage in risqué sex are also on the fringe of society in plenty of other ways.

The unfortunate side-effect of this, aside from promoting rather tired stereotypes about people who engage in sexual practices outside the immediate mainstream, is that it doubles back on the treatment of sex in the book. One’s erotic life only demands representation if it’s extreme and outside the norm, and thus, curiously, there’s an implication that if sex is being represented, and especially at length, it must be extreme and outside the norm. This is fuel for the fire of anti-obscenity and censorship advocacy groups that decry the portrayal of ANY sort of sexuality, be it on TV, in theatres, or in the library, fostering a climate where sexuality itself is taboo and inappropriate. And, as Judith Levine argues convincingly in her book, Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex, it is this unhealthy cultural attitude towards sexuality that leads to so many of sex’s negative consequences: unwanted teen pregnancy, the spread of STDs, etc.

Mosley’s novel isn’t particularly dazzling, overall. Remove the sex entirely, and it’s a fairly bland story about a guy who’s caught his girlfriend cheating and wants revenge, and not nearly as well written as his other works. The existential angst is somewhat juvenile – Cordell himself at one point thinks that it’s “just college stuff, the kind of thinking that kids discover – or rediscover – the first time they’re away from home.” The sex, occasionally pretty hot, ends up so surreal that it’s more ridiculous than arousing. What’s novel in the work is its overall treatment of the erotic, which is both brave and quite interesting. But subversive though it may be, it’s hardly revolutionary. Resorting to extremes to spice up the content, Mosley sells himself short, undercutting the power of the more mundane, but extremely powerful, way that he portrays the centrality of sex to everyday life, its validity as an object of inquiry, not to mention art.

Born in Poland, raised by vagabond mathematicians, Katarzyna Kunicka is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago, writing a dissertation on Polish and Irish literature. She loves books, movies, language, food, and hiphop. More of her inner monologue can be found at http://www.kasiapontificates.blogspot.com/

(1) Killing Johnny Fry website