All The Dirty Parts by
Daniel Handler, 134 pages
“From
bestselling, award-winning author Daniel Handler, a gutsy, exciting novel that
looks honestly at the erotic impulses of an all-too-typical young
man. Cole is a boy in high school. He runs cross country, he sketches, he
jokes around with friends. But none of this quite matters next to the allure of
sex. ‘Let me put it this way,’ he says. ‘Draw a number line, with zero is you
never think about sex and ten is, it 's all you think about, and while you are
drawing the line, I am thinking about sex.’ Cole fantasizes about whomever he
's looking at. He consumes and shares pornography. And he sleeps with a lot of
girls, which is beginning to earn him a not-quite-savory reputation around
school. This leaves him adrift with only his best friend for company, and then
something startling starts to happen between them that might be what he 's been
after all this time and then he meets Grisaille. All The Dirty Parts is an
unblinking take on teenage desire in a culture of unrelenting explicitness and
shunted communication, where sex feels like love, but no one knows what love
feels like. With short chapters in the style of Jenny Offill or Mary Robison,
Daniel Handler gives us a tender, brutal, funny, intoxicating portrait of an
age when the lens of sex tilts the world. ‘There are love stories galore,’ Cole
tells us, ‘This isn 't that. The story I 'm typing is all the dirty parts.’” Handler’s books just keep getting stranger. I’m not sure that I really liked this book
and I’m not sure that I’d recommend it to anyone, other than someone who was
specifically looking for Handler’s books.
