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The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse
The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse, a radical map of shortcomings in our daily experiences in the form of a debut story collection, presents thematically related windows into serious emotional trouble and monstrous love. Lonely Christopher combines a striking emotional grammar, reminiscent of Gertrude Stein's Three Lives, with an unyielding imagination in the lovely/ugly architecture of his stories.Lonely Christopher is the author of several poetry chapbooks and is a contributor to the poetry volume Into (Seven Circles Press). His plays have been published, staged in New York City and internationally, and released in Mandarin translation. His fiction received Pratt Institute's 2009 Thesis Award. He is a founding member of the small press The Corresponding Society and an editor of its biannual journal Correspondence. He lives in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn.
193 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 11, 2011
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549 people want to read
About the author
Lonely Christopher
12 books25 followersLONELY CHRISTOPHER is the author of the short story collection The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse, several poetry chapbooks, and the volume Into (with Christopher Sweeney and Robert Snyderman). As a librettist and playwright, his dramatic works have been published, staged in New York City and internationally, and released in Mandarin translation. He is a founding member of the small press The Corresponding Society and an editor of its biannual journal Correspondence. He lives in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
August 9, 2016
The short stories composing Lonely Christopher’s “The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse” are rife with devastating angst. While varying in their cohesiveness and complexity, all retain a core fascination with the violence and eroticism of human nature.
A boy broods over his boyfriend’s suicide until he comes back from the dead to talk. Head trauma and brutal familial dysfunction. A warped reinterpretation of the Pokémon Movie. A seven-foot-tall woman wanders through a grocery store in a daze. Stockholm Syndrome overtakes a boy who returns to his parents after living with a Humbert Humbert-esque abductor for four years. Volatile and barbarous teenagers are ineptly analyzed by disconnected adults. The evil underbelly of suburbia writhes and pulsates.
Christopher’s prose ranges from gorgeous to grotesque, from the beauty of everyday melancholies to the horrific corners of the imagination. He writes unapologetically absurdist scenarios. His characters are largely dubbed with bizarre names like Dumb, Right, Monday, Hamlet, and Gerund. The images and events described are more reminiscent of dreams and nightmares, landscapes of the mind, than reality: distorted magical realism as perceived by some moody guitarist like Nick Drake or Elliott Smith and colored with the madness of a Samuel Beckett play or William S. Burroughs’ novel.
Some stories followed an at least semi-linear plotline. My favorites were the title story “The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse” and “Nobody Understands Thorny When.” In these Christopher creates his most wholesomely disturbed and bittersweet worlds. They explore love and death and family relations with laudable depth and maturity. His writing here is at its most impactful as well. For example:
“[He] thought he might be telling a story through the mechanics of intercourse, the knowledge of which had always belonged to him and every other boy he had done this with. He couldn’t imagine what kind of story it was, but he didn’t care. He thought it was boring but necessary and since it was necessary it had to be fascinating. So it kept happening, the motions kept becoming actions.”
I found the more abstract pieces (“Game Belly,” “Milk,” “The Relationship,” and “The Pokémon Movie”) too frustratingly incomprehensible. They read too loosely and come off as haphazard experimentations. Good ideas are presented but not appreciably utilized. Plots are spliced and splattered together in a jumble. Creative, yes, but too esoteric even by absurdist standards.
Somewhere between these two poles are three more stories: “That Which”, “Burning Church”, and “White Dog.” “That Which” was, while very well done, an off-putting choice for the first story in the book, as it is written from the perspective of a brain-damaged boy and thus contains complex syntax and no paragraph breaks. “Burning Church” failed to be satisfyingly structured but manages to communicate its themes well. I’m fond of “White Dog” for its success with a quasi-stream-of-conscious style.
This short story collection reveals to me a talented author who has perhaps been indulged in his craft for too long. He knows how to write and practices it well but often these rampant manic word experiments distract themselves from the points he expresses and the themes he explores.
I still sincerely recommend it to those who share Christopher’s fascinations, but I would be hard-pressed to not criticize his excessive convolutions.
A boy broods over his boyfriend’s suicide until he comes back from the dead to talk. Head trauma and brutal familial dysfunction. A warped reinterpretation of the Pokémon Movie. A seven-foot-tall woman wanders through a grocery store in a daze. Stockholm Syndrome overtakes a boy who returns to his parents after living with a Humbert Humbert-esque abductor for four years. Volatile and barbarous teenagers are ineptly analyzed by disconnected adults. The evil underbelly of suburbia writhes and pulsates.
Christopher’s prose ranges from gorgeous to grotesque, from the beauty of everyday melancholies to the horrific corners of the imagination. He writes unapologetically absurdist scenarios. His characters are largely dubbed with bizarre names like Dumb, Right, Monday, Hamlet, and Gerund. The images and events described are more reminiscent of dreams and nightmares, landscapes of the mind, than reality: distorted magical realism as perceived by some moody guitarist like Nick Drake or Elliott Smith and colored with the madness of a Samuel Beckett play or William S. Burroughs’ novel.
Some stories followed an at least semi-linear plotline. My favorites were the title story “The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse” and “Nobody Understands Thorny When.” In these Christopher creates his most wholesomely disturbed and bittersweet worlds. They explore love and death and family relations with laudable depth and maturity. His writing here is at its most impactful as well. For example:
“[He] thought he might be telling a story through the mechanics of intercourse, the knowledge of which had always belonged to him and every other boy he had done this with. He couldn’t imagine what kind of story it was, but he didn’t care. He thought it was boring but necessary and since it was necessary it had to be fascinating. So it kept happening, the motions kept becoming actions.”
I found the more abstract pieces (“Game Belly,” “Milk,” “The Relationship,” and “The Pokémon Movie”) too frustratingly incomprehensible. They read too loosely and come off as haphazard experimentations. Good ideas are presented but not appreciably utilized. Plots are spliced and splattered together in a jumble. Creative, yes, but too esoteric even by absurdist standards.
Somewhere between these two poles are three more stories: “That Which”, “Burning Church”, and “White Dog.” “That Which” was, while very well done, an off-putting choice for the first story in the book, as it is written from the perspective of a brain-damaged boy and thus contains complex syntax and no paragraph breaks. “Burning Church” failed to be satisfyingly structured but manages to communicate its themes well. I’m fond of “White Dog” for its success with a quasi-stream-of-conscious style.
This short story collection reveals to me a talented author who has perhaps been indulged in his craft for too long. He knows how to write and practices it well but often these rampant manic word experiments distract themselves from the points he expresses and the themes he explores.
I still sincerely recommend it to those who share Christopher’s fascinations, but I would be hard-pressed to not criticize his excessive convolutions.
January 10, 2011
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
Since I put such an emphasis here on cutting-edge literature, I've learned the hard way just what a minuscule line lays between a fascinating experimental project and one that just never quite works, with of course that line often changing position merely between one individual reader and the next; take for example the slim story collection The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse by a New York poet and playwright who goes by the nom-de-plume "Lonely Christopher," the latest in Dennis Cooper's edgy "Little House on the Bowery" series for Akashic Books. And indeed, that's the main excitement of an iconoclastic series like this in the first place, is the uneven nature of the books that are picked, with some that stick with you in a cultishly obsessive way and some that simply fall flat; and although I acknowledge that Intercourse will likely be the former with a lot of readers out there, it was unfortunately the latter with me, a book that felt just a tad too pretentious and forced for my tastes, deliberately obtuse prose-poems that make little narrative sense and that are obviously designed primarily for back-of-pub live performances in the middle of the night, exactly Christopher's background as a writer. Although it will intensely appeal to some, it just didn't do it for me, and gets only a limited recommendation today, specifically to readers who are already fans of slam poetry, "Sister Spit" style monologues, and the like.
Out of 10: 7.7
Since I put such an emphasis here on cutting-edge literature, I've learned the hard way just what a minuscule line lays between a fascinating experimental project and one that just never quite works, with of course that line often changing position merely between one individual reader and the next; take for example the slim story collection The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse by a New York poet and playwright who goes by the nom-de-plume "Lonely Christopher," the latest in Dennis Cooper's edgy "Little House on the Bowery" series for Akashic Books. And indeed, that's the main excitement of an iconoclastic series like this in the first place, is the uneven nature of the books that are picked, with some that stick with you in a cultishly obsessive way and some that simply fall flat; and although I acknowledge that Intercourse will likely be the former with a lot of readers out there, it was unfortunately the latter with me, a book that felt just a tad too pretentious and forced for my tastes, deliberately obtuse prose-poems that make little narrative sense and that are obviously designed primarily for back-of-pub live performances in the middle of the night, exactly Christopher's background as a writer. Although it will intensely appeal to some, it just didn't do it for me, and gets only a limited recommendation today, specifically to readers who are already fans of slam poetry, "Sister Spit" style monologues, and the like.
Out of 10: 7.7
August 2, 2011
I tried, I really tried. Just couldn't do it. I tried to read each story. Each story I tried to read. I started reading each story, but only the last, White Dogs, did I read almost all of. Even that story I skipped through. FYI, Lonely, green peppers are not kept in the supermarket's "freezer".
September 4, 2011
2011 Book 93/100
You guessed correctly, friends - I absolutely picked this one up for it's title. How do you pass up a book on the library shelf that loudly proclaims it's title as The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse? Unfortunately the title was the best part of the book for me. It is a book that, as another Goodreader summarized in his review for the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]
"by a New York poet and playwright who goes by the nom-de-plume "Lonely Christopher," the latest in Dennis Cooper's edgy "Little House on the Bowery" series for Akashic Books. And indeed, that's the main excitement of an iconoclastic series like this in the first place, is the uneven nature of the books that are picked, with some that stick with you in a cultishly obsessive way and some that simply fall flat; and although I acknowledge that Intercourse will likely be the former with a lot of readers out there, it was unfortunately the latter with me, a book that felt just a tad too pretentious and forced for my tastes, deliberately obtuse prose-poems that make little narrative sense.."
Yep. That.
You guessed correctly, friends - I absolutely picked this one up for it's title. How do you pass up a book on the library shelf that loudly proclaims it's title as The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse? Unfortunately the title was the best part of the book for me. It is a book that, as another Goodreader summarized in his review for the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]
"by a New York poet and playwright who goes by the nom-de-plume "Lonely Christopher," the latest in Dennis Cooper's edgy "Little House on the Bowery" series for Akashic Books. And indeed, that's the main excitement of an iconoclastic series like this in the first place, is the uneven nature of the books that are picked, with some that stick with you in a cultishly obsessive way and some that simply fall flat; and although I acknowledge that Intercourse will likely be the former with a lot of readers out there, it was unfortunately the latter with me, a book that felt just a tad too pretentious and forced for my tastes, deliberately obtuse prose-poems that make little narrative sense.."
Yep. That.
November 26, 2011
i wonder what drugs this guy does. i've been trying to write like him for years and i only discovered this book like six months ago.
even as an aesthetic object, this book is brilliant. the title and the cover art make it so that you can't read it in public without risking shame or your life. Lonely Christopher's name and picture make him seem like a character from one of his own stories. the binding, the pages practically glued together (speculate on what was used as adhesive) make it so it's borderline impossible to open them, requiring you to snap the spine again and again and again. it's like the book simply doesn't want to be read. so inclusive. so private. so brilliant.
even as an aesthetic object, this book is brilliant. the title and the cover art make it so that you can't read it in public without risking shame or your life. Lonely Christopher's name and picture make him seem like a character from one of his own stories. the binding, the pages practically glued together (speculate on what was used as adhesive) make it so it's borderline impossible to open them, requiring you to snap the spine again and again and again. it's like the book simply doesn't want to be read. so inclusive. so private. so brilliant.
July 4, 2018
Full Review
The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse is a mixed bag, but I believe it does more right than it does wrong. There’s certainly enough good here to recommend it. Even though some of his experiments fail, it shows that Lonely Christopher clearly has talent and is willing to push the boundaries of what literature can do. I’ll be checking out some of the work that he’s put out since this debut.
The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse is a mixed bag, but I believe it does more right than it does wrong. There’s certainly enough good here to recommend it. Even though some of his experiments fail, it shows that Lonely Christopher clearly has talent and is willing to push the boundaries of what literature can do. I’ll be checking out some of the work that he’s put out since this debut.
Read
July 8, 2024I admit I picked the collection up just because of the title. But it's that time of the year when I'm too tired and too hot to be made to work to get something from a text. The eponymous story is okayish with its sycophantic flat affect but I did not care much for the rest.
June 7, 2019
I totally get that this isn't everybody's cup of tea, but some of the reviews are so harsh and wielded against dark experiments fiction as a whole. Anyway, from the first page, I was smitten. What a great structural invention to have a person suffering from some sort of brain injury speak only in single syllable words, as if his world view has shrunken and simplified. Yet, he possesses an advanced intuition such that he recognizes that his father is in a lot of pain, just not that the pain is because of his failure. There are definitely some challenging pieces about pedophilia and probably dysfunctional relationships, but even these are inventive takes on existential crises. The language really worked for me. My least favorite story was the one about the male-female couple in the taxi. My favorite was probably the one about the Dad trying to help his son get over a dead lover.
March 1, 2020
Uneven but not unenjoyable.
March 11, 2020
Even bisexuals will enjoy all of the gay/ lesbian jokes!!
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 7, 2021
I really enjoyed one of the stories. Most of them just didn’t connect with me.
September 4, 2023
I read this in 2018 and it changed me
July 2, 2024
Incredible cover, incredible writings , delve in ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
October 27, 2024
Mr Ashe Catchemall Hands
July 1, 2025
Could not take this out in public but the stories themselves were great. Best read in little pieces instead of all at once.
February 13, 2017
Uncomfortable experiences but interesting style.
May 17, 2012
Fantastic story collection. The first piece in particular is a great slice of Beckett-influenced short fiction (in that it is a long, seemingly rambling monologue from an immobile and brain-damaged narrator which achieves a poetic quality in its fractured grammar and repetitive phrasing). Comparisons to Gertrude Stein are also apt. No other story as a whole quite achieves what the first does, but there are moments of brilliance in each, and though some of the jokey character names later in the book grated on me, the only one to fall entirely flat was the "Pokemon Movie" sort of fanfiction/slash fiction pastiche. I appreciate what he was going for but I just didn't find it very worthwhile (particularly funny, insightful, etc.) especially compared to the rest of the collection.
April 10, 2012
a remarkable collection - clever and with heart. these stories are tricksy - structurally and linguistically fascinating - as soon as i think i know what they're doing they swerve and do something else. and the dialogue and beats are sensationally real/amusing (author's background in theatre comes through!).
the title story and "nobody understands thorny when" are my favorites, but they're all strong.
the title story and "nobody understands thorny when" are my favorites, but they're all strong.
June 15, 2011
A boring superficial extension of Dennis Cooper's style into slightly different subject matter. I didn't care at all for the characters which had no depth but at least had weird confusing names. If you want the original, read Cooper. This book was a waste of my time when there are so many other ones waiting to be read.
March 19, 2013
in the midst of reading this right now. in the vein of george saunders, jess walter, karen russell--whacked out realism, short fiction variety. feels like life. this book is published my dennis cooper--another hero/writer of our time.
October 31, 2011
I didn't finish it. I just couldn't get into it. Some of the short stories were quite interesting.
November 4, 2012
I didn't like the stories. When the cover art is more affecting than the prose I'd say there is a problem.
March 29, 2012
Interesting title.
Written by a fourteen-year-old going on four.
Written by a fourteen-year-old going on four.
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews