Charlotte Roche is a literary phenomenon. In April last year she was the first
German author to top Amazon's monthly bestseller list, outselling stellar
talents such as Khaled Hosseini. Her debut novel, Wetlands, has sold half a
million copies at home and is so sexually explicit that people are said to
have fainted at readings.
The book certainly requires a strong stomach, discussing, as it does, the
narrator's sexual preferences in minute detail, but is it cleverly packaged
pornography or an erotic classic? And why have so many people chosen to read
a novel that breaks all the conventional barriers of taste?
Admirers say that Roche has hit a nerve, while one German newspaper dismissed
the novel as “a masturbation pamphlet”. Now British readers are about to
encounter Wetlands for themselves and reach their own conclusions about a
novel that has sharply divided critics on the Continent.
Roche, 30, was born in England - High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, in fact -but
moved to Germany with her English parents when she was a child and speaks
English with a slight accent. Her parents divorced when she was 5, an event
that (as we shall see) has had a lasting impact on her life. She was an
early developer and became a TV star in her teens, making her name on the
German equivalent of MTV where she became notable for late-night interviews
in which she asked female celebrities about their sexual fantasies.
If this leads British readers to expect a sensual read from Wetlands, they are
in for a shock; the action takes place entirely on the proctology wing of a
German hospital, where Helen, Roche's 18-year-old narrator, is recovering
from surgery on her anus. The procedure was necessary because of a shaving
accident, and it gives Helen an opportunity to reflect on her body in
between fantasising about sex with a male nurse.
The novel's USP is a heroine who explores her own orifices with the
fearlessness of a 15th-century adventurer; Helen's vagina, anus and bodily
secretions fascinate her to a degree that will not necessarily be shared by
every reader. The novel's opening sentence, an admission that Helen has
always suffered from haemorrhoids, signals that nothing is off limits.
Forced to rest while her doctors wait for her to defecate successfully after
the operation, Helen reveals her unusual attitude to personal hygiene, which
includes smearing secretions from her vagina behind her ears as a substitute
for perfume: “It works wonders from the moment you greet someone with a kiss
on each cheek.”
These passages - and be warned, they are numerous - have persuaded some
critics that Roche's book is a feminist manifesto against so-called feminine
hygiene. It's a cry from the heart, they believe, against supermarket
shelves stocked with “intimate” deodorants and panty-liners; against
misogynist jokes comparing the odours of the female body to rotting fish.
But Helen goes to the other extreme, persuading a nurse to photograph the
open wound on her anus, boasting about popping blackheads and analysing the
smell of her faeces.
There is a paradox here: Helen's claim that she is championing a more relaxed
attitude to the female body is contradicted by her pleasure in stimulating
disgust. For much of the time she sounds like a young child who is desperate
to shock her parents; children have a habit of picking up revolting objects
and putting them in their mouths, and Wetlands consists of a series of
similarly stomach-turning moments. Helen is not so much liberated as
disturbed, mentioning in passing that she has been sterilised; she inserts
avocado stones into her vagina, reflecting that they are the only “children”
she will ever have. She plots to reunite her divorced parents at her
bedside, deliberately reopening the wound on her anus in an excruciating
episode that reveals her tendency to self-harm. This necessitates an
emergency operation, the graphically described horrors of which sit oddly
with Roche's claim that the novel is wildly funny.
What Wetlands has certainly done is to reignite a longstanding debate about
pornography. Every few years a novel appears that challenges the constantly
shifting boundaries on writing about sex, and in recent years the author of
the work in question has often been a woman. The last novel to have such an
impact was The Butcher by the French writer Alina Reyes, which shocked some
readers because its erotic scenes were set amid the butchered corpses of
animals. Last year Roche was mobbed by schoolgirls at the Leipzig book fair,
signalling that she had overtaken Reyes in the shock-erotics stakes, a genre
that makes controversial books from the past look rather anodyne. (However,
the Marquis de Sade is still causing trouble almost two centuries after his
death - his Turkish publisher faced prosecution five or six years ago when
he issued a translation of Philosophy in the Boudoir.)
These days, in Western Europe at least, arguments about pornography have moved
from the law courts to the literary pages, where the burning question is
whether writing that stimulates sexual arousal can also be literature.
Feminists entered the debate long ago, denouncing commercially produced
pornography - the campaign that the late Andrea Dworkin is best known for -
and the relentless sexualisation of violence in popular culture. Their
target was not the depiction of sex per se, but the objectification and
brutalisation of women that so often accompanies it, and a generation of
feminist novelists set about liberating female sexuality from these
depressing confines.
Some critics place Roche in that tradition, but perhaps the oddest thing about
her is that she seems blithely unaware of recent cultural history. Ten years
ago she appeared on German TV having not shaved her underarm hair and she
still talks with unconcealed glee about the uproar she caused. “Looking
back, I think, how brave, what an amazing thing to do on TV, aged 20,” she
said. “It's probably one of the worst things a woman can do: it really is as
if you are a witch; people want to burn you for it.” If this seems
hyperbolic, it is how Roche chooses to present herself - and some reviewers
have responded as though she is a significant feminist figure.
Wetlands has been compared to The Female Eunuch, presumably because of the
famous line in which Germaine Greer urged women to taste their own menstrual
blood; Greer got the idea from Caroline Coon, pop artist and founder of the
drugs charity Release, who posed for Cosmopolitan magazine with unshaven
armpits around the time Roche was born. Those were the days when women
eagerly passed Erica Jong's novel Fear of Flying from hand to hand, joined
consciousness-raising groups and consulted books such as Our Bodies,
Ourselves to find out how their sexual organs worked. Roche's tireless
promotion of herself as a feminist pioneer ignores generations of women who
grappled with all these questions long before she did; in that sense, she is
parasitic on feminism, borrowing its vocabulary, yet being almost totally
unaware of her own weirdly ambivalent attitude to the female body.
It is worth recalling, at this point, that Roche had reached the stage in her
career when a book was the obvious next step. It is almost de rigueur these
days for big-name interviewers to write a novel or autobiography, especially
if they have childhood traumas that they can share with the public. It does
not have to be Dave Pelzer-style abuse to hit the spot; the death of a
sibling or a messy parental divorce will do just as well. In interviews,
Roche talks frankly about her parents' separation, doing nothing to
discourage speculation that the novel is in some degree autobiographical:
“It's a massive thing in my life that my parents' home broke up. For me it's
a very strong problem; somehow I don't feel that I have roots anywhere.” She
attributes her choice of a career in TV to this early experience of
disruption, suggesting that she craves applause to compensate for something
- attention, presumably - she feels she did not get enough of in her
childhood.
The most revealing passage in the novel, however, is not about sex but a
description of Helen's mother: “Mom's afraid of the natural world and her
knowledge of it. She always seems to be fighting against it. She fights
against dirt in the household. She fights against various insects. In the
garden, too. Fights against bacteria of all kinds. Against sex. Against men
and women.”
No wonder Roche has asked her parents not to read Wetlands. The latest erotic
sensation reads a bit too much like a fictional version of Mommie Dearest
for comfort.
Wetlands by Charlotte Roche translated by Tim Mohr
Fourth Estate, £12.99 Buy
the book
