69 Things To Do with a Dead Princess

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 16 DEC 2002

British experimental novelist and cultural critic Home (Cunt) makes his American debut with his trademark fusion of highbrow theory and pulp pornography. Narrator Anna Noon is a randy 20-year-old living in Aberdeen, Scotland, having an affair with a mysterious older man named Alan, as well as the occasional threesome and foursome. Alan is obsessed with a cult book called 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess, whose author claims that he was hired to secretly dispose of Princess Di's body by dragging it around Aberdeen's ancient stone circles until it decomposed. Alan tries to test the author's story by dragging a carefully weighted ventriloquist's dummy around the stone circles. In between these experiments and orgies, Alan and Anna discuss postmodern literature. Alan offers a running commentary on novelists and theorists like Kathy Acker, Francis Fukuyama and Donna Haraway, tracing the evolution of experimental writing in the postwar era and weighing in with his own critiques ("Alan didn't like Johnson's Intellectuals.... Rather than developing an argument, Johnson simply reiterated his irrational prejudice against critical thinking in a series of poorly schematised chapters"). The contrast between these erudite lectures and the sex scenes, which Home writes in the coarse argot of porn novels complete with dozens of colorful synonyms for the relevant anatomy is amusing, though the joke wears thin after a while. There are bursts of vivid descriptive prose, as well as moments of demented humor (including the ventriloquist dummy's hilarious turn as narrator). Both the sex scenes and the arch commentary are occasionally tedious, but fans of Acker or Robert Coover may enjoy the metafictional conceit.