Tunnel of love vision

Tim Madden, the narrator of Norman Mailer’s Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1984), offers a perceptive instance of literary criticism when he recalls that ‘the best description of a pussy I ever came across was in a short piece by John Updike’. However, even that is not enough for him: what he would really like, he concludes presciently, would be ‘to have him guide me through the inside of a cunt’.

It is perhaps too simplistic merely to remark that Villages grants Tim Madden’s wish several times over, or to spot that six of the 14 chapters are, accurately, as it turns out, entitled ‘Village Sex’. Certainly, it is easy to become distracted by the genital description that they bemusingly contain: ‘[it] did not feel like Phyllis’s. Smoother, somehow simpler, its wetness less thick, less of a sauce, more of a glaze’; ‘her dear known sex in its gauzy beard of fur’; ‘that rosy badge of her authority to service the male’; ‘those livid wrinkles looking like lava folds’; and so on.