The Lady Is a Tramp

Boo

ks may not be as popular as movies or TV or music these days, but you have to hand it to them: they're still our filthiest medium, God bless 'em. You can get away with things on paper that you could never sing about or show onscreen. Michel Faber's colossal, kaleidoscopic new novel, The Crimson Petal and the White (Harcourt, 838 pages), tells the story of a prostitute in Victorian England, and if it's ever filmed, it'll be rated around an NC-45. But it also hints that reading and sex have a lot in common: both are a uniquely intimate exchange of secrets and pleasures, and both take place — generally speaking — between covers.

But don't wait for the movie. Read The Crimson Petal and the White now, while it's still a living, laughing, sweating, coruscating mass of gorgeous words. Don't be put off by the setting — London, 1874--or the length, or that unfortunate, overlong stuffed shirt of a title. Don't worry about its author's ominously French-sounding name (Faber is actually a Scot by way of Holland and Australia). Ever since last fall readers have been watching for another knockdown, breakout book on the order of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. It's here.

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"My name is Sugar," Faber's heroine tells us, "or if it isn't, I know no better." Sugar's body is for rent, but her mind is entirely her own. Nineteen, tall and flame-haired, she's an intellectual prodigy who charms her johns with inspired conversation and uninhibited bedcraft, then scribbles away at a novel while they snooze off their drink in her bed. (Faber's descriptions of lovemaking in an age of abundant undergarments and no antiperspirants are admirably frank.)

Sugar longs to climb the well-defended ramparts of English society, and her ladder up arrives in the form of William Rackham, the dreamy, indolent heir to a perfume empire. She turns his head with her literary prattle — she's like Lolita and Humbert Humbert in one body — and he installs her in a fancy apartment. Sugar's rise is rapid, but as a great man once said, mo' money, mo' problems. On her way up she has to deal with Rackham's dysfunctional family, including his half-mad mystic wife Agnes and his devout but lustful brother Henry, while at the same time concealing her shameful origins and making sure her sugar daddy stays sweet on her. Sugar seduces us because Faber lets us see both sides of her at once, the magnificent sexual schemer and the angry, damaged teenager whose mother sold her to a stranger at the age of 13. When she holds Rackham's little daughter Sophie, the only innocent soul in the whole book, Sugar feels "more physical joy than she's felt in a lifetime of embraces." It's a wrenching glimpse of the tender soul she might have been.

Faber's prose is an amazingly labile instrument, wry and funny, never pretentious, capable of rendering the muck of a London street and the delicate hummingbird flights of thought with equal ease. We're used to holding the Victorian period at a distance in sepia-colored photos and carefully art-directed Merchant Ivory productions, like a fragile heirloom grandma told us not to play with, but Faber's language seizes it roughly, takes us into the drawing rooms and up under the petticoats, and shows us people putting a brave public face on the private pain of life. The result is so fresh it makes contemporary novels, however packed with up-to-the-minute pop-culture references, feel dated. And although it's almost 300 pages longer than The Corrections, miraculously it feels shorter.

Like John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman, with which it deserves to stand, The Crimson Petal and the White is a postmodern take on the Victorian novel, and one of its distinctly postmodern leitmotifs is that almost everybody in the book is madly scribbling away at a book of his or her own. In reams of ink-and-tear-stained foolscap, they pour out the quiet, desperate, secret selves that stay hidden even in their most intimate moments. In mid-snuggle, Sugar and Rackham are worlds apart. "What terrifying ichor flows through her veins," Faber writes of Sugar, "what hopelessly foul innards she has, poisoned by putrid memories and the bitterness of want!" Words say things even bodies can't. And that's why a book like this is even better than sex.