creatrixisis 's review for:

The Wild Palms by William Faulkner

My mother asked me what I thought of it, and mentioned that she thought it sounded kind of "steamy" from the GoodReads summary, so this started out as a comment on her comment and then turned into a general commentary/review so I thought it would make more sense to just make my official comment lol.

I thought it was excellent. there's not really a lot of explicit sex in it, so i wouldn't call it steamy so much as "shocking" in the context of the times. there's a mention of using a douche, there's two abortions (not graphic, nothing like Cider House Rules, thank God), but the purpose of the sex is not for its own sake but to contribute to the realism of the book. the whole point is that there are two stories interpolated with each other, and they have absolutely NOTHING to do with each other. there's no crossover of characters, or even types of characters, time, place, etc. there are, however, various themes which are common to both. The name of one story is Wild Palms, and the other is Old Man. I remember my professor telling us what the deal was with the title being "If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem", but I don't remember what it was.… In any case, the Wild Palms story is where the sex takes place, and the realism of the relationship portrayed there is infinitely enhanced by the unequivocal, unapologetic, *unromantic* presence of their sexual acts.