Again, I found myself questioning this generalization. Maybe she didn't take s/m far enough.
Minkowitz has the talent and courage to be a much better writer, but first she will have to absorb her theoretical armament, get her defenses down into her core, like, say, Joan Didion, who looks passive but can be devastating. Minkowitz may lay claim to meanness, but, as the above passage indicates, she is closet-tender, a cream puff. Study of Didion's essays might teach her how to seduce and violate the reader's point of view.
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By Donna Minkowitz
Free Press, 175 pp., $24
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Minkowitz ends Ferocious Romancelike this: "I've had to disarm myself to get inside this land. I took off my weapons, and my incense too. And as my feet dipped in the velvety grass I could see that there was no redeemer. No enslaver. Only other people. I approached them with great joy." Lyrical as these lines are, they're also cryptic and ungrounded, and oddly reminiscent of science fiction. The reader doesn't know whether Minkowitz's velvety grass is in the fields of the lord or in her own backyard or both, and, by God, the question matters.
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