City of Desire: Christian Pan. Reviewed by Maeve Blackhead
The prolific erotic storyteller Christian Pan has a particular knack for connecting the unpredictable exuberance and the harsh loneliness of New York with the range of emotions and consequences that can arise from erotic encounters. The men and women populating his debut collection of stories, City of Desire, are mostly approaching middle age, reflecting on their sexual and professional lives, and their relationship to New York City.
Pan's writing is not only sexy but cinematic and literary; his characters feel real, like friends relaying their deepest secrets. In “Everything I Remember is Gone,” a forty-something European returns to New York after many years, lamenting both the creative life she abandoned as well as the loss of the city as it once was when everyone she knew “seemed to be an artist: dancers, actors, writers” [12]. With the city as her stage, she utilizes her sexuality and her desire to recreate a sense of artistry in her life, seducing a younger man in a downtown bar– “she felt in control, the director and the actor both within this unfolding little drama [5]." The story "Eddie Hand” (one of my favorites in this collection) explores a young man’s emergence into bisexuality, and how the city affords him the opportunity “be open about how I felt, who I was… New York seemed to be the place where nobody really cared” [56]. A man recollects his first sexual encounter as an undergrad at NYU in "Dorothy," remembering how New York “looked just like it did in the movies, only better. Gray iron, steel, like a garden of metal knives [68]."
The city-as-fantasy theme continues as the narrator has sex with a fellow student he meets during registration, but soon, the movie ends and reality sets in, and the object of his desire proves to be as indifferent as the streets of Manhattan. But City of Desire isn’t all heartache--there is an abundance of hot sex within these pages. Pan approaches erotica with an artistically observant eye, picking up on the contradictory nuances of expression: “The language of sex can be funny…how pleasure can appear the same as a wound, and how the expressions of agony can resemble ecstatic abandon [27]." City of Desire reminds us that humans, like great metropolises, are multifaceted, mutable, and mysterious.
Maeve Blackhead is a poet and research librarian living in New York City.
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