DIVORCE STORY

Sarah Manguso’ blow-by-blow account of a fracturing marriage.

- PARUL SEHGAL

Sex, like hemlines, follows fashions of its own, if novels are to be believed. The eighteen-hundreds was the peak era for the covert carriage assignation, and early-twentieth-century fiction revelled in sex al fresco-leave your britches on the riverbank, step right in for your marshy and mystical Lawrentian communion. The nineteen-sixties saw some awestruck, and genuinely ghastly, odes to anal sex by Norman Mailer and James Salter (from "A Sport and a Pastime": "She rolls over and in the full daylight he slowly inserts this gleaming declaration"). Sadism bordering on snuff was all the rage in the nineties, in the work of Dennis Cooper, Heather Lewis, and Susanna Moore. In the past decade, in what has been called the "millennial sex novel," masochism had a heyday, as sad-eyed young women in books by Sally Rooney, Miranda Popkey, and Raven Leilani slouched forward with plaintive appeals to be hit and hurt, just a little.