Without Wax and sad, sad, sad Week 34

Yeah, yeah, yeah, so I had another zero dollar week. No profits from writing.

Oh well.

I did read another great book worth checking out. It’s called Without Wax.

The real magic of William Walsh’s Without Wax (Casperian Books) is Walsh’s ability to make the reader have so much empathy and sympathy for the protagonist, Wax Williams – a man with an eighteen-inch (flaccid) penis. I like Wax. I just do. It didn’t feel like Walsh beat me over the head with attempts to reveal Wax’s character, but from the opening pages I found myself rooting for the guy. He seemed vulnerable to me . . . and human.

Two big sources leave us vulnerable according to Without Wax. What leaves us vulnerable? Well, sex and money. Both play a role in making Wax the unhappy man he becomes. Because sex is so taboo in our culture, most of us stumble into it and its mysteries on our own -- without guides. Guessing that everybody does it, Wax shaves his pubic hair as a young boy. This simple misunderstanding leads to fears by adults of his underdevelopment, which eventually leads to his overdevelopment. If he’d had someone to mentor him, maybe he never would have shaved – though, sadly, then we wouldn’t have Without Wax.

It’s the mystification and demonization of sex which fuels the porn industry, which is prevalent in the novel, but also prevalent in the real world. Without Wax examines how our relationship to sex has left most of us creeping around the subject – and sometimes creeping into peep booths or locking the doors to our rooms and watching porn. We have few healthy outlets for our curiosities and fantasies, so we have to turn to this seedy industry.

Of course, money plays into this, too. Wax’s endowment leaves him ripe for exploitation -- by his parents, by his manager, and by nearly everybody who sees his gardenhose-length member.

Though I wouldn’t have thought it at first, this novel says a lot about our society. Our relationship to money and our relationship to sex put Wax in the predicament he finds himself in. It puts many of us in the odd and sometimes unnecessarily shameful positions we find ourselves in.

In any case, this is a book that centers on a porn star and the porn industry, and it left me more intellectually stimulated than it did sexually stimulated. That’s pretty cool.

(I’ll admit, though, that there were some passages that raced my heart a little bit.)

I guess this isn’t really a review – it’s just me rambling after having finished the book. I did really like this book, though. I read it in a weekend – which is pretty darn fast for me. It’s rendered in an interesting way, which includes interviews with characters, second-person narratives, a complete movie screenplay, and court depositions. A very cool read to say the least, and another unique feather in the cap of Casperian Books. Motor City Blues, The Tea House, End Credits, and Without Wax are each very different from the other, and yet all four have their own strengths. You should go over to Casperian Books and buy one. You’ll be supporting a small (but up and coming) press. That’s always a good thing.

http://www.casperianbooks.com/catalog/shop.html