Author(s): Howard Jacobson

Fiction

Frank Ritz is a television critic. His partner, Melissa Paul, is the author of pornographic novels for liberated women. He watches crap all day; she writes crap all day. It's a life. Or it was a life. But now they're fighting, locked in oral combat. He won't shut up and she is putting her finger down her throat again. So there's only one thing for it - Frank has to go.

But go where? And do what? Frank Ritz has been on heat more or less continuously since he could speak his own name. Let him out of the house and his first instinct is to go looking for sex. Deviant sex, treacherous sex, even straight sex, so long as it's immoderate - he's never been choosy. But what happens when sex is all you know but no longer what you want?