All the Dirty Parts by Daniel Handler

From bestselling, award-winning author Daniel Handler, a gutsy, exciting novel that looks honestly at the erotic impulses of an all-too-typical young man. Cole is a boy in high school. He runs cross country, he sketches, he jokes around with friends. But none of this quite matters next to the allure of sex. “Let me put it this way,” he says. “Draw a number line, with zero is, you never think about sex and ten is, it's all you think about, and while you are drawing the line, I am thinking about sex.” Cole fantasizes about whomever he's looking at. He consumes and shares pornography. And he sleeps with a lot of girls, which is beginning to earn him a not-quite-savory reputation around school. This leaves him adrift with only his best friend for company, and then something startling starts to happen between them that might be what he's been after all this time-and then he meets Grisaille. All the Dirty Parts is an unblinking take on teenage desire in a culture of unrelenting explicitness and shunted communication, where sex feels like love, but no one knows what love feels like. With short chapters in the style of Jenny Offill or Mary Robison, Daniel Handler gives us a tender, brutal, funny, intoxicating portrait of an age when the lens of sex tilts the world. “There are love stories galore,” Cole tells us. “This isn't that. The story I'm typing is all the dirty parts.”

Ignore prudish opinions about this book. It's short and about sex. I think it's worth a few hours. Do not expect anything sweet or redeeming to happen. Handler keeps writing books about teenage love/angst, and it's always exaggerated but more honest than people want to admit. I like that.

OK so I know Daniel Handler can be a #problematic fave but I have really loved a lot of his books and I think he is a great writer who overall has good intentions but just like.....makes some big missteps sometimes...

So I picked this up even though I was a little wary of the premise. And now I have some questions...

like

who is this FOR though?

it's written from the POV of a v horny teenage boy and the whole story is set in high school, which basically seems YA, but it's marketed/shelved as an adult book, but then it's like...uncomfortable as an adult lady to be reading really explicitly about a teen boy's masturbatory and sex habits.

there's kind of a twist....or something...where the narrator ~gets comeuppance~ when
a) he abandons his “not gay but we jerk each other off” best friend for a horny new girl
b) the new girl uses him and moves on
c) the “not gay” friend gets a boyfriend (props to the book for actually having that character come out as bi while the narrator refuses to)

like...I get that we're not supposed to find the narrator's actions to be good, and I can totally be on board with exploring the world through the eyes of a narrator who's kind of a shitty person (and I think Daniel Handler has done this so well with like The Basic Eight for example), but with this the whole time I was just like... why

it reminded me more of Diary of an Oxygen Thief than I'm comfortable with :(

I still think he's a great writer and on the sentence level there were still some beautiful sentences in here but on the whole.....

why

who is this for

is it for horny teenage boys who seek it out of the adult fiction section?? I guess??