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The Saline Solution
“It was to have been a casual affair of impersonal intensity. We both had an unencumbered summer before us, and were thinking what a pleasure it would be to have a bedmate for the season, someone sophisticated, someone who would curl up and fall away easily when the leaves began to turn in the autumn. We decided to spend the summer on Fire Island. The child was conceived. And then the hatred began.”
See what happens when a young man surrenders himself to sexual exploration as a means of looking deeply into his own existence and into the philosophical void at the center of Western civilization.
See what happens when a young man surrenders himself to sexual exploration as a means of looking deeply into his own existence and into the philosophical void at the center of Western civilization.
186 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1971
1 person is currently reading
43 people want to read
About the author
Marco Vassi
36 books10 followersMarco Ferdinand William Vasquez-d'Acugno Vassi (New York City, November 6, 1937 – New York City, January 14, 1989) was an American experimental thinker and author, most noted for his erotica. He wrote fiction and nonfiction, publishing hundreds of short stories, articles, and more than a dozen novels. Many of his works appeared as "Anonymous" in their first printings. He is most often compared to Henry Miller, has been called the greatest erotic writer of his time and "foremost of his generation," and praised by the likes of Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Saul Bellow, and Kate Millett.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
November 27, 2016
Marco Vassi should be read if for no other reason than to appreciate the difference between artistically wrought eroticism and the jejune
Fifty Shades of Grey
, which has the ring of a sixteen-year-old girl talking dirty. Now that the middle class has embraced Fifty Shades and so blessed written sex, we can start discriminating among authors who treat sex as the plot and not just the plot twist. Vassi is one such author.
Born in New York in 1937, Vassi died there fifty years later. His life mirrored his art. A spiritual seeker who came of age during the 1960s, Vassi settled on sexuality and all the varieties of sexual experience as the gateway to enlightenment. At times he used sex the same way a Catholic uses the rosary, at other times the same way the desert fathers used hairshirts. A promiscuous bisexual, Vassi pushed the physical limits of his body in order to transcend it, which he ultimately did when he died of AIDS. The corpus of his work includes an autobiography, a dozen erotic novels, hundred of short fiction and nonfiction pieces, and a series of lectures. Although referred to as a contemporary of Henry Miller and praised by such authors as Norman Mailer, Vassi remains largely unknown. This is unfortunate because few writers have thought and written about sex with the depth and intensity of Vassi.
Vassi generally praised sex and eroticism as valuable and life-affirming--indeed, as the very source of life. His The Metasex Manifesto criticizes contemporary standards of sexual normalcy and advocates tolerance for the free liberation of erotic energy in all its permutations--no matter how bizarre or perverse those permutations might appear. Only such tolerance and liberation, Vassi believed, would lead us away from species-wide suicide.
And yet sometimes Vassi's novels--in particular The Saline Solution--present a darker side to human sexuality, depicting it as the road to perdition. Vassi reminds us that sex as life energy is morally neutral but can be channeled into some very destructive deeds. In The Saline Solution, Vassi describes a post-Summer of Love dystopia in which the promises of sexual revolution result in misery, violence, despair, and murder. It is April 1970, and the unnamed New Yorker narrator of Vassi's novel has recently impregnated his latest fling. New York's recent decriminalized abortion confronts the narrator with a novel moral dilemma: keep the baby or kill it. Yes, abortion was legal, the narrator acknowledges, but “we wondered also whether it was admirable.”
In the end, the mother's choice trumps the narrator’s choice. Lucinda, the mother, opts for “the saline solution,” i.e., the use of intravenous saline as an abortifacient. Vassi's narrator stands impotently by, filled with self loathing at the thought that he has participated in the murder of an unborn child simply to preserve his “liberated” sex-and-drugs lifestyle. Ironically, Vassi's novel, which conservatives would censor as pornography (if they read it), scathingly indicts the “choice” in “pro choice.” Vassi's novel confronts the reader with a clearly articulated moral contradiction: lifestyle versus life.
Vassi provides few biographical facts about his narrator. He's in his early 30s, a lapsed Catholic, bisexual, and married to but later divorced from a Japanese woman he met overseas. Thereafter the narrator drifts through the 1960s involved in a series of failed relationships, failed new-age therapies, a failed flirtation with Marxism, and now at the start of the 1970s marginally supports himself as a failed actor. In New York, he looks for sexual diversions with as many women and men as possible, occasionally living off the trust fund money of a well-to-do bourgeois conquest. At the novel's beginning, he has connected with the WASP-ish Lucinda for what he describes as “a casual affair of impersonal intensity.” But when he accidentally impregnates her, the affair becomes anything but causal or impersonal.
To appreciate the narrator’s response to Lucinda's pregnancy--to his unborn son--requires an understanding of the narrator’s values. In many ways the narrator’s response to the unwanted pregnancy mirrors his response to an unwanted, hated society. In the narrator's view, society is inherently fascist, and for one to be placed in the position of deciding the life or death of an unborn child is a symptom of that fascism. We are a paranoid and suicidal species, hypnotized by the media and conditioned by priests and politicians (“hollow and vicious tricksters”), to follow, like robotic sheep, brutal rulers. Only “awake” people--those immune to media hypnotism--have the capacity to threaten the status quo. The majority of us, however, are not awake, but vibrate instead with unconscious homicidal rage that finds its most perfect expression in the legalization of abortion. This revelation fills the narrator with revulsion. “The real abortion is us,” he says.
It follows then that sex itself must mirror societal sickness. The narrator’s sexual exploits, always impersonal, usually while on drugs, and frequently violent, do indeed sicken. At one point, he rapes and threatens to murder a female acquaintance in front of her three-year-old son, though the rape scene may in fact be an elaborate and twisted fantasy between the narrator and his ersatz victim. It is difficult to say because in the narrator’s world women seek and find sexual release at the hands of violent men. All women have a rape fantasy. They are the ultimate sex objects, which makes them both more than they are and less then they are--but in either case, not what they are. The narrator values women in only their archetypal roles of providing food, pleasure, and mothering. “The rest,” he says, “is chitchat.” That being so, he regards women with “benevolent nonrecognition.”
It is to be expected, then, that sexual perversion--not sex--exhilarates the narrator. Perversion, from spontaneous sadomasochism to being casually sodomized by a queue of anonymous men in an anonymous alley, arouses him. Such extremes provides him those rare moments when he feels truly alive. The narrator unashamedly describes himself as perverted and accordingly sets himself to the task of satiating the entire range of physical appetites with as many partners--serially or simultaneously--as he can. Plurality and poly-sexuality are the means by which he realizes his true human potential. Monogamy, on the other hand, is a fascist scheme to control the life force by enforcing sexual exclusivity between human pairs who, by their nature, are polymorphously perverse. Nothing arouses the narrator's fury against a woman like his fear that she seeks exclusivity, meaning she has grown dependent on him.
And yet, fulfillment--human or otherwise--eludes the narrator. A void at the core of his being tortures him. He sleeps with countless partners to unsuccessfully fill that void--and he assumes others sleep with him for the same reason. On his quest for physical variety, the narrator doesn't care what others feel; he only cares about how they can make him feel. People are means to a transient and unsatisfying end. Humans are just machines, biological pumps and bellows that, if used masterfully, can trigger all the physical responses that nature has programmed into the body.
Love--disdained by the narrator as naive and dangerous--is absent from his universe. Unsurprisingly, hatred is always near at hand. The narrator hates himself, he hates the people he sleeps with, he hates society, he hates the world, he hates humankind in general. And he hates with an erotic intensity that manifests itself as sexual violence, which he always directs at women. So Vassi presents us with a figure not ordinarily seen in fiction: the liberated, progressive, left-wing, bisexual, angry white man who uses sex as a weapon against women and ultimately himself.
When it comes to homosexuals, the narrator has a slightly more charitable view. He frequently craves “male energy” (women drain his energy). The narrator prefers homosexuality to heterosexuality and wonders at one point if he has sex with women simply to evade his homosexuality. He describes homosexual sex as a “contest” whose goal is not climax, but sheer number of physical contacts. Infinity lurks behind this quest, whose impossibility reminds the narrator of the limits of all physicality. Thus homosexuality has, the narrator believes, the advantage of happening between people who possess “a more precise understanding of one another's desperation.” Homosexual violence is also qualitatively different: violence between men is just “theater,” whereas when the narrator beats a woman, he means it. Concomitantly, men have violent sex with him to help him get his “scene together;” a woman who rakes his back with her nails really want to destroy him.
Into this world of nihilism, violence, and paranoia, enters the narrator's unborn son, whom the narrator and Lucinda name “Dante G.,” after the poet of Hell. It is perverse, and perversely honest, to name a creature you intend to kill. Because Dante G. has a name, he is more an actual person than the narrator himself, and Dante G.'s naming underscores the horror of abortion. Vassi's narrator has no doubt that his unborn child is a person--not a fetus, and not an “it.” As such, Dante G. is also the narrator’s Jiminy Cricket, the one thing in the narrator’s godforsaken world that causes him to question the moral and ethical dimensions of his life.
Because of Dante G. and the availability of legal abortion, the narrator realizes he is not a social revolutionary whose sexual exploits are ripping down the uptight ramparts of fascist society--he is just another killing tool in service to that society. Pondering the impending abortion of Dante G., he reflects, “When you've destroyed one human being, you've destroyed us all.” The brute fact of Dante G. forces the narrator to acknowledge that by all principles, the unborn child in Lucinda's womb “had a complete right to life.” So why doesn't he fight for Dante G.'s complete right to life? The answer is the epitome of bathos: because it could make Lucinda dependent on the narrator, and that would violate his values of sexual non-exclusivity. A family would be such a drag.
There are echoes in Vassi's narrator of Joe, the sadistic narrator of Alexander Trocchi's Young Adam , who also rapes and murders and is, in all likelihood psychotic. But unlike Trocchi's Joe, Vassi's narrator displays glimmers of conscience in spite of himself. Still, there is nothing admirable about Vassi's narrator or about the so-called free love and drug scene in which he moves. He is a broken human in a broken world, a woman-hating narcissist who, as much as he brutalizes women, seeks the same brutalization at the hands of his homosexual lovers. It is a world realized in literary fashion by Vassi with great descriptive skill. Vassis's accounts of the many permutations of copulation are rich and varied. He does for the literary depiction of sex what Sam Peckinpah did for the cinematic depiction of violence: he slows it down, revels in it, revealing exquisite small details that are simultaneously horrifying and beautiful, complex and novel, vulgar and ethereal.
And yet for all his descriptive brilliance, Vassi's sexual narratives are mechanically rococo, stylistically breathtaking but devoid of the single element that separates people from beasts and holds forth the promise of a spiritual dimension to conjugation: a conscious, self-reflective emotional identification with another person. Indeed, sex in Vassi's novel is at the end of the day, and as his narrator observes, “the Grand Guignol of life.” Vassi's narrator achieves the ultimate in physical stimulation by sacrificing emotional intimacy, which leaves him literally buried by copulating bodies but terrifyingly alone. Ironically, the one intimate relationship the narrator does establish is with his unborn son, Dante G. And that relationship ends in death and banality. Envisioning his child exterminated and expelled, his carcass caught “in a metal pale,” the narrator stands alone in his bathroom, empty and meaninglessness while contemplating the path of his own piss through the sewers of New York on its way “to the wounded and vengeful ocean beyond.”
The Saline Solution is a challenging novel. It is recommended only to readers who can tolerate disturbing imagery and know their own values well enough to judge the deeds portrayed in this erotic masterpiece. It seems that a term is lacking to describe a novel such as this,one that portrays sex as the end of the world and not the beginning, or what Vassi calls “annihilation politics.” Both erotic and apocalyptic, perhaps the proper term is “eropalyptic.” Because ultimately, in the narrator's battle between life and death, lifestyle trumps life. Here Vassi has effectively portrayed not a lifestyle but a “deathstyle.” For those who dream of a more liberated sexuality in the sunshine of free love and open relationships, Vassi's novel warns of a very dark netherworld where the sun of sexuality sets.
Born in New York in 1937, Vassi died there fifty years later. His life mirrored his art. A spiritual seeker who came of age during the 1960s, Vassi settled on sexuality and all the varieties of sexual experience as the gateway to enlightenment. At times he used sex the same way a Catholic uses the rosary, at other times the same way the desert fathers used hairshirts. A promiscuous bisexual, Vassi pushed the physical limits of his body in order to transcend it, which he ultimately did when he died of AIDS. The corpus of his work includes an autobiography, a dozen erotic novels, hundred of short fiction and nonfiction pieces, and a series of lectures. Although referred to as a contemporary of Henry Miller and praised by such authors as Norman Mailer, Vassi remains largely unknown. This is unfortunate because few writers have thought and written about sex with the depth and intensity of Vassi.
Vassi generally praised sex and eroticism as valuable and life-affirming--indeed, as the very source of life. His The Metasex Manifesto criticizes contemporary standards of sexual normalcy and advocates tolerance for the free liberation of erotic energy in all its permutations--no matter how bizarre or perverse those permutations might appear. Only such tolerance and liberation, Vassi believed, would lead us away from species-wide suicide.
And yet sometimes Vassi's novels--in particular The Saline Solution--present a darker side to human sexuality, depicting it as the road to perdition. Vassi reminds us that sex as life energy is morally neutral but can be channeled into some very destructive deeds. In The Saline Solution, Vassi describes a post-Summer of Love dystopia in which the promises of sexual revolution result in misery, violence, despair, and murder. It is April 1970, and the unnamed New Yorker narrator of Vassi's novel has recently impregnated his latest fling. New York's recent decriminalized abortion confronts the narrator with a novel moral dilemma: keep the baby or kill it. Yes, abortion was legal, the narrator acknowledges, but “we wondered also whether it was admirable.”
In the end, the mother's choice trumps the narrator’s choice. Lucinda, the mother, opts for “the saline solution,” i.e., the use of intravenous saline as an abortifacient. Vassi's narrator stands impotently by, filled with self loathing at the thought that he has participated in the murder of an unborn child simply to preserve his “liberated” sex-and-drugs lifestyle. Ironically, Vassi's novel, which conservatives would censor as pornography (if they read it), scathingly indicts the “choice” in “pro choice.” Vassi's novel confronts the reader with a clearly articulated moral contradiction: lifestyle versus life.
Vassi provides few biographical facts about his narrator. He's in his early 30s, a lapsed Catholic, bisexual, and married to but later divorced from a Japanese woman he met overseas. Thereafter the narrator drifts through the 1960s involved in a series of failed relationships, failed new-age therapies, a failed flirtation with Marxism, and now at the start of the 1970s marginally supports himself as a failed actor. In New York, he looks for sexual diversions with as many women and men as possible, occasionally living off the trust fund money of a well-to-do bourgeois conquest. At the novel's beginning, he has connected with the WASP-ish Lucinda for what he describes as “a casual affair of impersonal intensity.” But when he accidentally impregnates her, the affair becomes anything but causal or impersonal.
To appreciate the narrator’s response to Lucinda's pregnancy--to his unborn son--requires an understanding of the narrator’s values. In many ways the narrator’s response to the unwanted pregnancy mirrors his response to an unwanted, hated society. In the narrator's view, society is inherently fascist, and for one to be placed in the position of deciding the life or death of an unborn child is a symptom of that fascism. We are a paranoid and suicidal species, hypnotized by the media and conditioned by priests and politicians (“hollow and vicious tricksters”), to follow, like robotic sheep, brutal rulers. Only “awake” people--those immune to media hypnotism--have the capacity to threaten the status quo. The majority of us, however, are not awake, but vibrate instead with unconscious homicidal rage that finds its most perfect expression in the legalization of abortion. This revelation fills the narrator with revulsion. “The real abortion is us,” he says.
It follows then that sex itself must mirror societal sickness. The narrator’s sexual exploits, always impersonal, usually while on drugs, and frequently violent, do indeed sicken. At one point, he rapes and threatens to murder a female acquaintance in front of her three-year-old son, though the rape scene may in fact be an elaborate and twisted fantasy between the narrator and his ersatz victim. It is difficult to say because in the narrator’s world women seek and find sexual release at the hands of violent men. All women have a rape fantasy. They are the ultimate sex objects, which makes them both more than they are and less then they are--but in either case, not what they are. The narrator values women in only their archetypal roles of providing food, pleasure, and mothering. “The rest,” he says, “is chitchat.” That being so, he regards women with “benevolent nonrecognition.”
It is to be expected, then, that sexual perversion--not sex--exhilarates the narrator. Perversion, from spontaneous sadomasochism to being casually sodomized by a queue of anonymous men in an anonymous alley, arouses him. Such extremes provides him those rare moments when he feels truly alive. The narrator unashamedly describes himself as perverted and accordingly sets himself to the task of satiating the entire range of physical appetites with as many partners--serially or simultaneously--as he can. Plurality and poly-sexuality are the means by which he realizes his true human potential. Monogamy, on the other hand, is a fascist scheme to control the life force by enforcing sexual exclusivity between human pairs who, by their nature, are polymorphously perverse. Nothing arouses the narrator's fury against a woman like his fear that she seeks exclusivity, meaning she has grown dependent on him.
And yet, fulfillment--human or otherwise--eludes the narrator. A void at the core of his being tortures him. He sleeps with countless partners to unsuccessfully fill that void--and he assumes others sleep with him for the same reason. On his quest for physical variety, the narrator doesn't care what others feel; he only cares about how they can make him feel. People are means to a transient and unsatisfying end. Humans are just machines, biological pumps and bellows that, if used masterfully, can trigger all the physical responses that nature has programmed into the body.
Love--disdained by the narrator as naive and dangerous--is absent from his universe. Unsurprisingly, hatred is always near at hand. The narrator hates himself, he hates the people he sleeps with, he hates society, he hates the world, he hates humankind in general. And he hates with an erotic intensity that manifests itself as sexual violence, which he always directs at women. So Vassi presents us with a figure not ordinarily seen in fiction: the liberated, progressive, left-wing, bisexual, angry white man who uses sex as a weapon against women and ultimately himself.
When it comes to homosexuals, the narrator has a slightly more charitable view. He frequently craves “male energy” (women drain his energy). The narrator prefers homosexuality to heterosexuality and wonders at one point if he has sex with women simply to evade his homosexuality. He describes homosexual sex as a “contest” whose goal is not climax, but sheer number of physical contacts. Infinity lurks behind this quest, whose impossibility reminds the narrator of the limits of all physicality. Thus homosexuality has, the narrator believes, the advantage of happening between people who possess “a more precise understanding of one another's desperation.” Homosexual violence is also qualitatively different: violence between men is just “theater,” whereas when the narrator beats a woman, he means it. Concomitantly, men have violent sex with him to help him get his “scene together;” a woman who rakes his back with her nails really want to destroy him.
Into this world of nihilism, violence, and paranoia, enters the narrator's unborn son, whom the narrator and Lucinda name “Dante G.,” after the poet of Hell. It is perverse, and perversely honest, to name a creature you intend to kill. Because Dante G. has a name, he is more an actual person than the narrator himself, and Dante G.'s naming underscores the horror of abortion. Vassi's narrator has no doubt that his unborn child is a person--not a fetus, and not an “it.” As such, Dante G. is also the narrator’s Jiminy Cricket, the one thing in the narrator’s godforsaken world that causes him to question the moral and ethical dimensions of his life.
Because of Dante G. and the availability of legal abortion, the narrator realizes he is not a social revolutionary whose sexual exploits are ripping down the uptight ramparts of fascist society--he is just another killing tool in service to that society. Pondering the impending abortion of Dante G., he reflects, “When you've destroyed one human being, you've destroyed us all.” The brute fact of Dante G. forces the narrator to acknowledge that by all principles, the unborn child in Lucinda's womb “had a complete right to life.” So why doesn't he fight for Dante G.'s complete right to life? The answer is the epitome of bathos: because it could make Lucinda dependent on the narrator, and that would violate his values of sexual non-exclusivity. A family would be such a drag.
There are echoes in Vassi's narrator of Joe, the sadistic narrator of Alexander Trocchi's Young Adam , who also rapes and murders and is, in all likelihood psychotic. But unlike Trocchi's Joe, Vassi's narrator displays glimmers of conscience in spite of himself. Still, there is nothing admirable about Vassi's narrator or about the so-called free love and drug scene in which he moves. He is a broken human in a broken world, a woman-hating narcissist who, as much as he brutalizes women, seeks the same brutalization at the hands of his homosexual lovers. It is a world realized in literary fashion by Vassi with great descriptive skill. Vassis's accounts of the many permutations of copulation are rich and varied. He does for the literary depiction of sex what Sam Peckinpah did for the cinematic depiction of violence: he slows it down, revels in it, revealing exquisite small details that are simultaneously horrifying and beautiful, complex and novel, vulgar and ethereal.
And yet for all his descriptive brilliance, Vassi's sexual narratives are mechanically rococo, stylistically breathtaking but devoid of the single element that separates people from beasts and holds forth the promise of a spiritual dimension to conjugation: a conscious, self-reflective emotional identification with another person. Indeed, sex in Vassi's novel is at the end of the day, and as his narrator observes, “the Grand Guignol of life.” Vassi's narrator achieves the ultimate in physical stimulation by sacrificing emotional intimacy, which leaves him literally buried by copulating bodies but terrifyingly alone. Ironically, the one intimate relationship the narrator does establish is with his unborn son, Dante G. And that relationship ends in death and banality. Envisioning his child exterminated and expelled, his carcass caught “in a metal pale,” the narrator stands alone in his bathroom, empty and meaninglessness while contemplating the path of his own piss through the sewers of New York on its way “to the wounded and vengeful ocean beyond.”
The Saline Solution is a challenging novel. It is recommended only to readers who can tolerate disturbing imagery and know their own values well enough to judge the deeds portrayed in this erotic masterpiece. It seems that a term is lacking to describe a novel such as this,one that portrays sex as the end of the world and not the beginning, or what Vassi calls “annihilation politics.” Both erotic and apocalyptic, perhaps the proper term is “eropalyptic.” Because ultimately, in the narrator's battle between life and death, lifestyle trumps life. Here Vassi has effectively portrayed not a lifestyle but a “deathstyle.” For those who dream of a more liberated sexuality in the sunshine of free love and open relationships, Vassi's novel warns of a very dark netherworld where the sun of sexuality sets.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 16, 2017
I’d never heard of this or Marco Vassi before stumbling across a copy of The Saline Solution in a second-hand place, and thought the work would be a dated curio. I did not know, therefore, he was a critically admired writer of the (mainly) 1970s and ‘80s counter culture, one that produced works like this on matters of sexual exploration. All discredit to me.
A melancholy sometimes disturbing novel about the risks we take when we engage in casual sex outside established relationships, or an “affair of impersonal intensity,” and the dangers of sexual freedom. Not least, the aftermath when plans for an “unencumbered” affair go awry. The book is very much about sex even when sex if not taking place – its motivations, pleasures, dangers, and consequences. For all the bleakness, the sexual description is sensuous and liberated, and relief is provided by Vassi’s honed sense of the absurd.
It has made me want to give Vassi’s ‘The Erotic Comedies’ a try next before another of his novels.
A melancholy sometimes disturbing novel about the risks we take when we engage in casual sex outside established relationships, or an “affair of impersonal intensity,” and the dangers of sexual freedom. Not least, the aftermath when plans for an “unencumbered” affair go awry. The book is very much about sex even when sex if not taking place – its motivations, pleasures, dangers, and consequences. For all the bleakness, the sexual description is sensuous and liberated, and relief is provided by Vassi’s honed sense of the absurd.
It has made me want to give Vassi’s ‘The Erotic Comedies’ a try next before another of his novels.
January 22, 2018
A novel of the sexual revolution reflecting New York City hipster culture around 1970, which I read some 40+ years ago. I remember it as having a certain dreary angst to it.
November 28, 2020
Leí este libro en la universidad. Fue el primer libro que leí de la serie de la Sonrisa Vertical. Y en su momento me dejó shockeada. Tenía 21 años. A los 33, la leo con otros ojos y otra forma de pensar.
En género erótico, actualmente, tiene un gran estigma encima. Pero este libro es oro puro. Maravilloso.
En género erótico, actualmente, tiene un gran estigma encima. Pero este libro es oro puro. Maravilloso.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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