You Want to Put That Where?

By Courtney Andree | Thursday, March 1, 2007

BOOK REVIEW

Anatomy of a Boyfriend
Daria Snadowsky
Delacorte Books, 2007

If Anthony Comstock had come in contact with Daria Snadowsky’s Anatomy of a Boyfriend, a century ago, he surely would have doused it with kerosene and tossed it into the nearest bonfire, slapping Ms. Snadowsky in cuffs a minute later. If the author hopes to fool you into thinking that this is light-hearted young adult fiction by inserting a cutesy dedication to Judy Blume, she’s got it all wrong. From the get-go it is clear that this is not your mother’s Nancy Drew, or your own Sweet Valley High. If first lines are indicative of quality, I will not venture to analyze the opening of Anatomy, but allow it to speak for itself. Snadowsky writes, “My best friend, Amy, wants to wait until college to “do it,” but until then she’ll do “everything but” with boys she thinks are cute and have good bodies.” While “obscene, lewd, and/or lascivious” in its own right, this opener has nothing on the oral and manual sex tutorials that appear later on. The primary (and most troubling) incongruence in Anatomy of a Boyfriend is the simple fact that it is written at a second grade reading level, while its subject matter is, I imagine, more explicit than most hardcore erotica.

The learning curve for 17 year-old Dominique Baylor is high and full of surprises. In the course of the novel, she morphs from a smart, savvy, well-intentioned teenager, who connects with her family and loves bass fishing, into an “empowered” hypersexualized woman, who counts the “Big O” as one of her highest accomplishments. Forgetting about her lifelong dream of becoming a doctor, and her future at Tulane, “Dom” throws herself mind, body, and organs, into the pursuit of track star Wesley Gershwin. Though I hate to say it, our little nerd is better left to her textbooks and Science Quiz questions. When she turns her studies onto herself, the results are likely a bit dumbfounding for a pre-teen reader. After her first meeting with Wes, as she slips and falls outside of the porta-potties at the football game, she dreams of him:

Without really thinking about it, I start lightly stroking my breasts with my fingertips until I feel my nipples harden. Then I move my hand down my torso and slowly tickle the area below my belly button. It’s so relaxing, but energizing too. I can even feel my undies start to get wet.

Indeed. Can’t we all. It is slightly endearing that even as she feels herself up, she remembers, “In my human anatomy class we learned the clitoris has eight thousand nerve fibers, at least twice as many as a penis.”

This scene is tame in comparison to the “awakening” that comes within the next two-hundred-fifty-pages. The meddlesome and painful teenaged relationship functions as a way for Dominique to learn more about herself. Once Wes breaks her heart, she can become her own best friend. The novel is set up as a frame narrative, with Dominique sitting alone in her bedroom at the beginning and end of the novel, free from masculine “control.” At the beginning, she is interrupted by her father. But at the end, armed with battery-powered assistance, she finishes the job that her man could not: “There’s certainly something new and different here that I’d felt only hints of before with Wes—heavier tingles, and a deep pulsing.” Ms. Snadowsky writes as if she’s been there before,

Almost instinctively, with my right hand I start to move the machine up and down, from the top of my pubic hair line to the sheets. It feels good everywhere, but I start narrowing in on one particular spot, right above my vagina. More tingles and pulses. My heartbeat quickens, and I hold my breath…I moan again as I feel my lips and cheeks contort.

While I will not inquire as to which lips or cheeks the author is referring, I will again put myself in the shoes of her intended pre-teen audience. When I was in elementary or middle school, all the romance I needed on my reading list was “boy-meets-girl-boy-kisses-girl”—certainly not a tutorial on pleasure and genitalia.

It is almost sad when this intelligent young girl is reduced to a pile of quivering genitals and hormones. Her life is no longer just about her, as she expresses, “I am Wes-ed, Wes-inated, Wes-erized…Suddenly my body is good for something more than just carting me around.” Neither is it about her family, friends, hobbies, or intellectual pursuits. Withdrawing from everything that was important to her before, Dominique is consumed by her puppy love. The action is mediated through her eyes, and since the reader is privy to absolutely everything (in lurid detail), it becomes almost unbearable to read on. Her first-person accounts of botched blow-jobs, experiments in sadomasochism, and lusty backseat encounters, are overanalyzed, and described in saccharine terms. In the space of a single page, he “nibbles,” she “whinnies,” they both “tickle,” “gnaw,” “bite,” and “explore.” We even see a monstrous pun with Wes deeming her his “Dominatrix.”

All things considered, though, Anatomy of a Boyfriend would make a delightful primer for the incoming college freshman. As we follow our cast to college, we already know what they don’t: they are doomed. These “high school honeys” aren’t fated to make it . After packing on the “freshman fifteen,” undergoing a housing disaster, and suffering a minor academic crisis, Dominique returns home for winter break. On the day of her grandmother’s funeral, and the day before her birthday, Wes dumps her over instant messenger. The following chapter counts down her misery by the minute, painfully retracing her steps as she vomits in the bathroom, punches the wall, cries to her parents, and stuffs everything that reminds her of him into a plastic bag. I wish the section had ended here, but Snadowsky cannot leave well enough alone, apparently. Next, we must sit with Dominique as she makes a “massive” bowel movement, with “intestines [that] are trying to strangle me from the inside out,” and watch as she tries to kill herself.

Beyond this raunchy tendency, the novel is plagued by deeper stylistic issues. A large portion of the text is presented as instant messenger or email conversations. Whether the author intended to be experimental or just plain sloppy with this “innovation,” is difficult to determine. Somehow, the exposition becomes even more trite within this format:

DominiqueBaylor: Who’s Jessica? An EFM friend?
The100MeterDash: No, my collie.
DominiqueBaylor: Oh, Jessica’s a very human name for a dog.
The100MeterDash: Well, we got her 10 years ago back when we lived in San Antonio. The girl next door, Jessica Sky, had this red-orange hair that matched the collie’s fur exactly, so I named it after her.

This is not a “coming of age story.” This is very simply a story about coming. In the future, I’ll stick to my Hardy Boys and Bobbsey Twins, and leave all Daria Snadowsky books for the Homecoming bonfire. It’s nice for the birds and the bees to retain a little mystery.

You Want to Put That Where?

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