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Oysters Among Us:
Erotic Tales of Wonder
- by Susannah Indigo
$14.95
ISBN 0970467729
available through
Amazon
Reviewed by Anne Tourney
(02/06/02)
Have you ever made love blindfolded on a ski lift in the middle of a frosty winter night?
Dazzled shoppers in a mall with the beauty of your naked body? Looked at your partner of many years and felt the freefall of sheer lust? Magic manifests itself in the exotic and the ordinary in Oysters Among Us, a novel woven from thirteen interlacing stories. From the heat of these sexy tales to the lyrical grace of Susannah Indigo's prose, this book offers an Aladdin's cavern of sensual treasures.
In a nutshell, Oysters is about a group of people (friends, lovers, spouses, family members), living in Boulder, Colorado and San Francisco, California. But the book quickly overflows that nutshell, expanding into wild flights of fantasy and erotic adventure. The novel's subtitle, "Erotic Tales of Wonder," suggests an innocence of spirit, an openness to magic. Indigo's characters have an abundance of sexual experience (or sexual gifts waiting to be unwrapped), but they haven't lost their potential for joy. Even the more jaded among them learn to open themselves to the enchantment of everyday experience. When Sam the toughened journalist attends a high-sex class with Annie, his lover, he rediscovers the thrill of his earliest sexual revelations:
Bodies seem to be just bodies, touch is just touch, I am wise and I am open to new things. I'm fascinated by every naked person in this room. Maybe it's true that every person is born bisexual and we just rarely get around to discovering it. I know that every man in this room is hard and I seem to find that fascinating too. Sex is the most interesting thing in the world, just like it was when I was thirteen and experimenting with my boyhood friends.
Pleasure isn't limited to the flesh; the imagination brings ecstasy, too. Out of the book's many surrealistic reveries, one of my favorites is Nita's dream of being naked at the mall. Indigo transforms an archetypal nightmare of public shame into a sparkling scene of self-affirmation:
My body is now covered in piercings, an entire universe of stars, the Milky Way glittering from my eyebrows down to my toes, and I am the most beautiful thing in the mall. Men stop and make offers to buy me, but I refuse. The manager at Trice Jewelers comes out and asks if he can hire me for the holidays to sit in his display window in the middle of all the diamond rings, but I refuse that too. "I am now a stellar cartographer," I explain, "not some astronomical bimbo for sale."
As an adult reader, I relished the voluptuous delights of Oysters, but the book also took me back to the reading experiences of my childhood. The novel's free-flowing structure let me indulge my oldest fictional fantasy: that the characters have lives of their own, and that they continue to exist after I've closed the book. I don't think I could bear it if the characters from Oysters Among Us stopped existing after the book ended. By the time I'd read (and reread) these stories, I felt that I'd found friends, lovers, and teachers in Annie and Sam, Jack and China, Nobeko, Nita and Ruby, and the others who populate these shimmering tales.
The book's fluid form suits its content, because these stories celebrate the flux of human identity. Indigo's characters have a deep solidity, but they also possess the power to transform themselves into anything they want to be. This power, Indigo implies, belongs to all of us, and its source lies in our humble, glorious bodies. How many fabulous creatures exist in a single individual? A shy accountant turns into a polyamorous sex goddess. A sexy Don Juan becomes the slave of a dominatrix. An unhappy wife adopts a mysterious online persona and meets a man who fulfills one of her beloved fantasies. In the warm light of Indigo's imagination, they accomplish this shape-shifting without judgment. "The most important sin I observe every day," says Madelaine (also known as the dominatrix Darkstar), "is the failure to imagine and live out your very own life as it was meant to be."
But pleasure and delight don't come without their shadows: pain and regret. After Jack coaxes China out of her shell, he finds himself reluctant to commit to her. Nobeko can't blossom in her unhappy marriage, but leaving her husband requires the courage to face the breakup of her family. And the self-imposed silence of bluenote, abandoned by her lover Sam, holds a world of rage and despair. There are dark riffs in the music of these tales. Annie Braverman reveals to bluenote, as they stand on the Golden Gate Bridge, that she considered suicide after a love affair ended:
It seemed so intensely important at the time. I was miserable. Some man broke my heart. I was obsessed with that loss. I was empty. I couldn't feel anything. Do you know that at least twenty-five people have jumped off this bridge and survived the jump? And that none of them who have been interviewed ever even tried to kill themselves again? Most said they regretted it the second they left the bridge. Things change. Chaos subsides. Time alters our existence -- one day out of the blue I learned that there was joy in the world and it was mine for the taking if only I would pay attention and reach for it.
We can recover from pain through sex and kindness, as Annie Braverman discovers. Healing isn't easy, however, especially when the wounds are many years old. Annie's friends see her as a wise priestess, at ease with herself and her body. But during a retreat in the Colorado mountains, Annie relives the shame of being rejected by her first lover, a Catholic boy whose priest warned him that Annie was a "slut":
Eddie chooses not to go to hell for me. There is nothing between us after that: no words, no more discussion, no one to talk to -- just the craving in the night for that touch once again. I never mention this drama to a soul, and proceed to turn thirteen, craving love and absolution, but my family's not even religious, never mind Catholic, so boys will have to do.
As a woman, Annie learns not only to accept her powerful libido, but to embrace it as her greatest gift. Annie's erotic spirituality is the book's center. I see her as being the novel's heart, leading the beat of sensual freedom. She owns twenty-six translations of the Kama Sutra and dreams of rewriting that masterpiece for the twenty-first century. Her friends and lovers go to her for sexual inspiration, flock to her fantastical parties, and cherish her wisdom. Wherever she appears, Annie leaves behind a trail of gems. I hold this one close to my heart: Sex and creativity are part of the same continuum. By being fully alive in our bodies, using all of our sensual powers, we are being creative every day. Like great sex, creativity requires a release of judgment, a generous spirit, and the courage to express our desires freely.
Ironically, the things we often equate with freedom -- material wealth, sex without emotional ties, conventional physical beauty -- can be our toughest obstacles. When Annie's uncle dies and leaves her rich, her money turns out to be a burden. It's not until the end of the novel, when Sam, her lover, helps her use the money in a way that reflects her breadth of spirit, that she can accept her wealth. China grew up in a commune, having sex from the time she was barely a teen, but her early promiscuity leaves her ill at ease with her body. Nobeko works hard to maintain her stunning figure and to be a good wife. But her self-deprivation leaves her miserable until she takes responsibility for her own happiness.
True to its mission of enchantment, the book has a fairytale ending. I won't give it away, but I'll reveal that novel closes with a star-shower of wish fulfillment. No junk food wishes, either -- each gift feeds the characters' souls.
"I have a wish, Sam," says Annie to her lover, "And it's free, like most of my wishes." I have a wish, too. I wish that many more books like Oysters would be published, erotic novels with depth and substance, wisdom and magic. I know that those books are out there, being imagined and written and lived. Oysters makes me want to devour all of them.
Review ©2002 by Anne Tourney
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Anne Tourney has published erotic fiction in various journals and anthologies, including the 2002 editions of the Best American Erotica and Best Women's Erotica, Zaftig: Well-Rounded Erotica, and The Unmade Bed. Her serial novel, The Motel Donna Maria, will appear at Scarlet Letters beginning this February.
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