[In the following excerpt, Allen criticizes the sexual premise and Minot's “shoddy” writing in Rapture.]

The novella form sneaks in and out of fashion. At its best—in the hands, for example, of Henry James, Gustave Flaubert or Joseph Conrad—its spare structure imposes shape and discipline, and it can achieve a formal perfection that eludes the broader, more sprawling novel. Often, though, the novella reveals itself as merely a failed, or aborted, novel, a creature too frail and fleshless for full artistic life.

This is the case with two new attempts: Joyce Carol Oates' Beasts and Susan Minot's Rapture both weigh in at barely more than 100 pages. Oates and Minot are capable, professional writers; if they have chosen the confines of the novella form, one would like to think it is because they know what they're doing, but each of these tales seems more like a misfired full-length effort than a well-plotted shorter one. Rapture, in fact, was originally advertised as a novel, but evidently someone at Alfred A. Knopf thought better of the classification and affixed a blank sticker over the words “a novel by” before sending out the review copies.

A wise move, for Rapture is not so much a novel, not so much a novella even, as souped-up magazine fiction, real Cosmo-girl material. Why did Minot decide to publish this? What can she have been thinking? Although she may not be a writer for the ages, her work so far—three thoughtful, sometimes excellent novels and a collection of short stories—has established her as someone consistently worth reading. Her last novel, Evening (1998), was a graceful, bitter, fluid piece of work, one of the smartest and most memorable books in recent years.

After a work of that quality, the careless and immature Rapture is hard to account for. Could it be a result of Minot's slumming about in the movie business, as the screenwriter of Bernardo Bertolucci's abysmal Stealing Beauty? It's possible; the film and the novella share a mindless fetishization of sexuality for its own sake that ultimately manages to make sex, that most perennially fascinating of all subjects, seem dull.

Rapture is entirely constructed around—and this is not a joke, it is a straight-faced stroke of romanticism on the author's part—a blow job. The longest one in recorded history, or at least it comes to feel that way to the reader. The couple involved are referred to as “old lovers,” but should more properly be called “former lovers,” since Kay and Benjamin are not old at all. They are in their vigorous mid-30s, prototypes of the vaguely glamorous, stupefyingly self-involved cappuccino quaffers who peopled the lower levels of New York's art, literary and film businesses during the 1980s and '90s, and whom Minot anatomized in Lust (1989), her short story collection.

That is all we ever get to know about Kay and Benjamin. Minot is not interested in their characters, only in their “relationship,” insofar as non-characters can be said to have a relationship. They were lovers, it turns out, for three tortured years, but during that time Benjamin could never bring himself to break up with his longtime and long-suffering girlfriend, Vanessa. Finally Kay, fed up with waiting, put an end to the affair. Now, a few years later, they meet again for an afternoon of sexual abandon that means something quite different to each of them.

Minot, born in 1956, belongs (as do I) to a generation that grew up being told that men and women, contrary to assumptions the human race had made for millennia, were essentially the same; their apparent differences were due merely to cultural conditioning and gender stereotyping. Ever since the intellectual tide turned in the 1980s, we have been painstakingly rediscovering the obvious, aided by accessible and simplistic documents like Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, of which Rapture is only a marginally higher-brow version.

The narrative veers from Kay's point of view to Benjamin's and back again, the better to illustrate the fundamental differences between male and female. Kay and Benjamin represent contrasting aspects of femininity and masculinity rather than actual people:

This was a whore's job, after all. The more degraded she felt, the more saturated with sex, and happier. She was dissolving into a sex personality, there to be used by him whenever he wanted. She was not particularly feeling his manly strength at the moment, he was not even moving, but she was aware it was in him. It was in him somewhere, that driving urge to overpower her.

Shades of Heathcliff! In Minot's scheme Woman uses sex to “commune,” Man to “conquer.” Another point of difference is in what we have come to call “confrontational style”: When it came to whether he should leave Vanessa, for instance, or even tell her that he is seeing someone else, Benjamin was, “as he said, taking other things into consideration. He called those things obligation and loyalty. To Kay they looked like avoidance and denial.”

Minot tries, or pretends, to give the hapless Benjamin equal time with Kay, but in the end she vindictively lets him fester in the personal hell his passivity and faithlessness have created. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that she is simply prejudiced against him for being male. Rapture comes off as jaundiced and pissed-off, as though the author wanted personally to punish an unsatisfactory lover. It is also full of shockingly banal and shoddy writing. The following is typical:

She felt how wound up she'd been. What relief this was. She was tired of having to look out for herself, tired of beating through thick brush. She didn't realize how tired. Trying to sort out the right way to behave if she was going to get where she wanted ultimately. Which wasn't likely this. At least, that's what she'd convinced herself of.

Huh? What teacher, much less editor, would let this prose get by? And the grammar is shaky, too: Minot describes her characters—more than once—as “in thrall with” rather than “in thrall to” a lover; claims that instincts “were easily mistaken with [rather than “for”] desires and fears”; Benjamin cracks “some usual jokes”; and Kay finds penises “foreboding”—when surely she means “forbidding.” Let's hope the powers-that-be at Knopf slipped the new edition of Fowler's Modern English Usage into Minot's Christmas stocking—and into her editor's as well.