So as you know, we took off updating Monday through Wednesday because of a senior thesis draft deadline. Well, due to a computer crash deleting my senior thesis, I’ve spent the past five days doing nothing but writing my thesis. It’s okay, it all turned out really well. But, and I don’t really want to sound whiny but feel I do have to stress this point, I have spent the past five days doing nothing but writing my senior thesis.
Let’s read some fucking erotica.
Chapter Nineteen
The chapter opens with a happy scene of a happy Eva, Gideon, and Cary happily eating Chinese food on a happy Monday night and Eva keeps commenting on how happy everything is and how happy she is about her happy life. So I guess everything’s going to hell by the end of the chapter.
we flipped channels and laughed over the hilarious names of some reality television shows
Eva’s happy that the two most important men in her life are getting along, “ribbing and playfully insulting each other in that way men had”, because Sylvia Day sure loves her stereotypes. Even if they don’t make any sense.
He cracked his fortune with a flourish, and then scowled. “What the fuck?” […] “Confucius say,” Gideon ad-libbed, “man with hand in pocket feel cocky all day.” […] Gideon smiled. “Pwned by a fortune.”
Yayyy we get racism and we get… uh, okay, I’m not actually sure what’s going on with the word “pwned” here. Apparently the characters in this novel are fourteen. That’s uncomfortable. They’re having way too much sex for fourteen year olds. Hell, Cary’s having way too much sex for anyone.
The intercom buzzed and Cary leaped to his feet to answer it. He glanced at me with a smile. “Maybe it’s Trey.” […] But when Cary answered the door a few minutes later, it was the leggy blonde from the other night who came in. […]
[She] gave a little wave and preceded Cary out. I mouthed behind her back to Cary, What are you doing?
He winked
Dude, Cary sucks.
Eva starts thinking about how Gideon has a hotel room as a “fuck pad”, and wonders if he had a fuck pad in college. I don’t know what Sylvia Day thinks college students are like, but I personally know people who have had sex in cars, communal showers, academic buildings, and with other people present in the goddamn room (ew). If a college student’s answer to “do you have a fuck pad?” and the answer isn’t “my bed”, then they are the figment of Sylvia Day’s imagination she’s clearly writing about.
They make love and go to bed. Then Eva has a nightmare about her past about her step-brother raping her, wakes up, and realizes Gideon is trying to rape her in his sleep. Yeah, this is gonna be difficult to talk about on a literary review/entertainment blog.
Rolling to my side, I sobbed, my eyes streaming tears that blurred my view of Cary shoving Gideon across the room and into the wall, denting the drywall. […]
Swallowing past my burning throat, I pushed up to a seated position. My gaze locked with Gideon’s and I watched the haze of sleep leave his eyes, replaced by a dawning horror.
“Dream,” I choked out, catching Cary’s arm as he reached for the phone. “He’s d-dreaming.”
Okay. So the scene is really disturbing and the quality of the writing isn’t so bad. But here’s the problem. Sylvia Day has demonstrated on many previous occasions that she has no clue whatsoever how to accurately depict a victim of sexual abuse. Whatever Gideon has going on, it’s done much more significant damage to his mental state than we see in Eva, but Sylvia Day has already compromised her credibility to depict such matters with any sense of realism. The severity of his condition is a little hard to believe – certainly conceivable in the way that any mental abuse theoretically could be – but we really need to trust our narrator to make this make sense to us, and we already know Sylvia Day is incapable of doing this job she needs to do.
For example, I’m taking an intro creative writing class right now, and we read a section of Jerome Stern’s Making Shapely Fiction where he talks about the trouble with writing about things you don’t know very well, because it will “make readers instantly suspicious”, and gives us this example:
“Mush, mush,” Nooknook shouted, as he threw bits of meat to make his dogs bound across the ice floe.
See how ridiculously that reads? Well that’s kind of what reading Bared to You is like, except instead of Eskimos, we have victims of sexual abuse. And it’s just as suspicious.
I slid my hand into his sweatpants. […] Fear lingered just beneath my arousal, but I was more afraid of losing him than of living with the demons inside him. […]
“Let’s forget,” I breathed into his mouth. “Make us forget.”
This is why I don’t trust you, Sylvia Day.
The chapter wraps up with a sex scene in which Gideon refuses to finish out of some weird sort of act of penance, and Eva literally jumps on his penis to suck him off, which in no way reads really problematically in a very bad sort of irony.
I dove for it with hands and mouth, ignoring his vicious curse. Pinning his torso with my forearm, I pumped him hard with my other fist and sucked voraciously on the sensitive crown.
Then later in the chapter Trey walks in on Cary cheating on him.
“Fuck you, Cary. We talked about this! You promised!”
“You’re blowing this out of proportion,” Cary barked. “It’s not what you think.”
But it goes okay because Trey is a dumbass.
I faced him with my arms crossed. “Screwing a heartbroken lover on the same sheets he’s just caught you cheating on isn’t going to make things better.” […]
Cary grabbed wineglasses out of the cupboard. “I can feel you judging me. Stop it. He wouldn’t be half as pissed if it’d been a man he caught me fucking.”
Dude, Cary sucks.
But Is It Better Than Fifty Shades of Grey?
Does this even matter anymore?
The Winner This Round: Me, because I have a forty page draft of my senior thesis and I wrote half of it in two days. So I get to win this one. Me. Uh, have a good weekend, everybody!