A Book A Week - Week 22: Fifty Shades of Grey

This week's book:
    Fifty Shades of Grey  by E.L. James

Grade: C-

Dear Penthouse:

I always thought the letters in Penthouse Forum were fake, and I certainly never expected this to happen to me.  But...  I read ‘Fifty Shades of Grey.‘  All the way through.  I still can’t believe someone like me read something like that, and when I think of the details it’s like a hazy dream...

I got the e-book, because I just couldn’t bring myself to actually walk into a bookstore - not even Half Price Books - and let someone else see what I was buying.  It doesn’t come in a plain brown wrapper the way proper pornography should.
    I read the first chapter of the e-book, and I was underwhelmed by the prose.  It wasn’t bad, certainly not as bad as ‘Twilight,’ but, really, what else is?  It wasn’t great either, and there were spots where it could have used a serious rewrite.  The heroine is a college Senior who helps out her sick roommate by conducting an interview for the school newspaper with not-yet-thirty multimillionaire Christian Grey.

Right away, Penthouse, I knew I was in for a conflict with my suspension of disbelief.  Most twenty-somethings are saddled by back-breaking student debt and barely know how to wipe their own asses, let alone paddle someone else’s... but I’m getting ahead of myself.  Let’s just say that the story at this point already was treading precarious ground.  And I know I’m putting myself in that ‘letters to Forum are fake’ category, but I carried on reading.
   The main character Ana is not really so much a person as a blank screen on which the reader - mostly females - can project themselves.  She’s clumsy, a particularly uninteresting trope I’ve noticed, and she doesn’t think of herself as attractive at all, even though others clearly think she’s drop-dead gorgeous, including the whip-thin-yet-ripped, copper-haired, loose-pants-wearing, sexual deviant hero.  Ana falls victim to his whirlwind attentions, and - inexplicably - allows him to whisk her on his helicopter to his Bond-villain lair in Seattle.  Yes, Penthouse, I did say helicopter.  Which the twenty-seven-year-old gorgeous specimen of an anti-hero flies himself.  Because he has all that spare time from running his multi-million dollar manufacturing enterprise.

Once they’re in his crisp, white, impossibly chic and hip penthouse (HA!), things get hot and heavy.  He shows her his ‘playroom,’ where he keeps his whips, chains, restraints, and cages, and she does not run screaming to the police.  No, she signs an NDA and they discuss his ‘dominance’ contract.
    It was about here, Penthouse, that I started feeling uneasy.  Dirty, even.  Then, a few e-pages later, we got to the pornography.  And I’m not engaging in hyperbole here, Penthouse, this is real pornography, graphic details of Ana’s first ever sexual encounter.  Encounters, there’s the bed, then the tub, then the bed again.  Maybe this is the thing for this genre, if this is a genre other than porn, but it’s not something I’m used to reading in a book.  In the letters section of a magazine, however...

It all went downhill from there, Penthouse.  The heroine goes home after her night with Christian Grey, and tries to return to normalcy.  But she’s just too stupid... sorry... too obsessed with him and his sinister, controlling ways to let it go.  Because he’s a millionaire - as all freaky, under-thirty, super-sexy BDSM guys have to be, I suppose - he can lavish gifts and clothes on her in an attempt to ‘woo’ her.  This, of course, makes her a prostitute as well as stupid, but even though Ana realizes this it doesn’t seem to bother her all that much.  Not enough to give the stuff back, anyway.
   There were more sex scenes, Penthouse, bondage-type encounters that really made me cringe.  Honestly, it was like reading a gruesome description of murdering bunnies or something, which I suppose could be someone’s fetish but certainly isn’t mine any more than a good, crisp spanking is.  Yeah, spanking’s in there too, right before Ana realizes that she’s in over her head and needs to escape Christian Grey.  All that bondage and dominance, and it’s a spanking that does her in.  Go figure.  Oops, I hope I didn’t spoil the story for you, Penthouse.  Oh well, if you don’t want to read the book now, I suppose it’s all my fault.  Darn me and my clumsy writing...

All in all, Penthouse, it was a particularly uncomfortable experience.  The ‘story’ part of the book felt like the string on a pearl necklace, just there to tie the glistening orbs of pornography together.  The characters aren’t really characters, they’re not even archetypes, they’re just bodies with impossible back stories and hollow motivations.

If I were you, Penthouse, I’d give this book a pass.  Reading the letters in your Forum section is much more honest.

-- DH 

Next week:
   Inferno  by Dan Brown
   I'm dipping a toe into the 'DaVinci Code' water, where I've never swam before.  Clearly my standards have been reduced after 'Fifty Shades of Porn.'