Hello, do you know anything weirder than what someone else thinks is hot? My wife and I write love stories together, which considering the types of love stories we tend to write—usually romantic, frequently monogamous, often queer—means that we mainly write about sex. I like to think that my wife’s and my ideas of what is hot are pretty aligned, but every now and then we startle each other entirely. Once she told me that she thought Max Greenfield is not objectively attractive. I am a lesbian, but I thought it was common knowledge that Schmidt from New Girl was one of the handsomest men alive. What?!
Anyway, there’s something specifically gut-clenching and heart-pounding about someone who is not handsome but is hot. Onj and I wrote a novel about two objectively good-looking people and that was great fun, but writing and reading about objectively ugly people has turned out to be even more fun. Here, let me prove it—
In one of the best gifts I have ever gotten, my aunt recently sent me a 20kg box crammed full of books, many of which were totally new to me. My favourite discovery so far is Wang Anyi, a Chinese writer who rose to fame in the 80s, and though Brocade Valley (a slim hardback in my box) is more thrilling in its form, LOVE IN A SMALL TOWN captured my heart more totally. Love in a Small Town has a fairly circular, repetitive narrative: two young people in a dance troupe become infatuated with one another, grow angry at their infatuation, give into it, resist it, and give in again. As such, it’s a psychological novel invested in the minutiae of minds: how can you live through the same emotions and physical responses again and again, and keep finding slightly new shades or details or growth in them? Once in a while the narrative drifts out of the extremely tight and cyclical erotic obsession and into a wider portrait of the town. Anyi drifts across the disparity and dichotomy between villagers and townies, the water men singing their freedom as they drift past, all the clothes being brought in and out of the rain, like a tender and wry reminder that romantic obsession is only as unusual as everything else.
The reason I am reccing this book in this newsletter: both characters are explicitly ugly, and extremely hot as as a result. She has a strange, rough body (fatphobia certainly plays a role here, but there is a sense of monstrous proportions that move beyond the usual boring narratives—“yet once you are accustomed to it,” Anyi writes, “normal, well-proportioned bodies actually seem flat and dull”); he is weedy and wrinkly, like a little old man at 17, and yet tormented with such adolescent agonies as bacne. Did you think it was impossible to make bacne sexy? Read Wang Anyi: “… as though the nutrition he absorbs must have an outlet, and since he gains neither height nor weight, all the nutrition and energy go towards nurturing his spots, which are like small red beans, a sign of his youthful vigour. When the spots gradually subside, they leave behind small brown hollows like wells. His back, in particular, is full of such hollows, and strongly resembles the rough surface of a rock. Each brown well is filled with a drop of sweat, clear and transparent.” Jesus! Take me now! There is so much sweat in this book. There is so much obsession. There is so much looking at each other and grimacing and thinking that one, the one who looks like no one else. All pretty people are the same, every ugly person is hot in their own way, etc etc.
(I read the Eva Hung translation; you can find it quite cheap on ebay, Abebooks & the like. try your library!)PAIRS NICELY WITH: A Prayer for Owen Meaney by John Irving, the book that has the power to make me cry with more embarrassing vigour than any other book. The novel’s eponymous hero is not just unattractive but ridiculous; extremely short, cursed with an eternal falsetto, “rodent-like”. If he’s cute as a child, it’s a curse (watch his classmates pass him overhead amongst themselves while he squawks to be let down), and the cuteness certainly fades and fades fast. There’s a different kind of attraction on show here; the narrator John treats Own with reverent passion, one that claims to be interested only in his mind but is of course rooted in a physical form John would love to find an excuse for obsessing over. He does find his excuse—Owen is the reason John believes in God—but you don’t have to! Enjoy. Just make sure you stay hydrated.
(buy @ bookshop)CONSIDER ALSO: Jane Eyre, of course, and also Danny Lavery’s long ago essay on casting Jane Eyre; Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga (Miles isn’t exactly ugly, but a lot of people insist that he is—and I have a soft spot for Lord Mark); Katherine Dunne’s Geek Love, a book I haven’t read since I was a teenager but am assured holds up; sorry that I bring T.H. White’s The Once and Future King up in every newsletter, but… Lancelot; speaking of Arthurian takes, I dare you to find a hotter Morgan than the widely reviled one who appears in Victoria Gosling’s new, wonderful Bliss and Blunder; the really lovely bit in The Twits where Quentin Blake illustrates Roald Dahl’s idea of ugly vs good thoughts shining through.