Recently, I publicly read a story of mine about a man and woman whose experiments with sexual role-playing go awry when the woman feels the man is abusing her. She becomes frightened, then angry; they fight, reconcile, and go to sleep in each other's arms. Afterward, an audience member commented that the story seemed to him an optimistic American version of Milan Kundera's "The Hitch-Hiking Game"— another story of a couple playing a sexual game that becomes abusive, except that the woman proves unable to call a time-out. "Game" ends with her curled in a ball, sobbing while the man regards her with distaste. The audience member thought Kundera's characters were darker and more jaded than my problem-solving Americans, and he repeated the chestnut that Americans are, of course, more naive... More >>>