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Too Much Flesh and Jabez
Coleman Dowell's "Southern Gothic" is a novel about sexual repression. Miss Ethel, a spinster school teacher, decides to write what she calls a "perverse tale" about one of her former students, a Kentucky farmer named Jim Cummins. Endowing him with unnaturally large genitals, she spins a tawdry tale of his frustrated relationship with his petite wife. Expressing all the bitterness of "an old woman's revenge," Miss Ethel's tale is nonetheless a sensitive depiction of rural life in the early years of World War II. Dowell's masterful use of the tale-within-a-tale to explore psychological states makes Too Much Flesh and Jabez a memorable achievement.
"This story has a beautiful simplicity, like a film in sepia that passes like a dream. . . . What's really proposed in Dowell's gender-shifting, acrostic narrative devices is an omnisexual, self-consuming modern consciousness." (Gary Indiana, Voice Literary Supplement 6-93)
"This novel is a meticulously and subtly composed tour de force on the imagination." (Gilbert Sorrentino, New York Times Book Review 1-1-78)
"The South, having produced writers like Faulkner and Flannery O'Conner, has always been the most fertile source of American romance. Coleman Dowell is very comfortably a part of this tradition." (Washington Post Book World)
"Dowell writes with a superb power of constant implication�always careful, always energetic, always suggestive." (Thom Gunn, Times Literary Supplement)
"Dowell's achievement is to keep such a plot on the right side of pornographic farce and construct an intelligent and highly-charged erotic tale that is near impossible to put down." (Gay Times 4-95)
151 pages, Paperback
First published November 16, 1977
1 person is currently reading
283 people want to read
About the author
Coleman Dowell
20 books9 followersBorn in Kentucky in 1925, Robert Coleman Dowell is one of the great post-war US writers. He is the author of 5 novels including One of the Children is Crying, Island People and Mrs October Was Here.
Coleman Dowell's short stories, as is much of his work, are difficult to contextualize, shatter prior conceptions of what fiction should encompass, and break away from previous fictive forms. Some of the stories include a rich, crafted Gothicism, others a compelling surrealism, and still others an expertly timed lyricism. Dowell's characters are multidimensional, sometimes moving through the stories at metafictional levels. They are always reacting to the alienation of self, attempting to understand flawed beauty, and desperately striving to focus on the numerous splintered fragments of their fractured lives. He died in 1985.
Coleman Dowell's short stories, as is much of his work, are difficult to contextualize, shatter prior conceptions of what fiction should encompass, and break away from previous fictive forms. Some of the stories include a rich, crafted Gothicism, others a compelling surrealism, and still others an expertly timed lyricism. Dowell's characters are multidimensional, sometimes moving through the stories at metafictional levels. They are always reacting to the alienation of self, attempting to understand flawed beauty, and desperately striving to focus on the numerous splintered fragments of their fractured lives. He died in 1985.
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
June 15, 2012
Is it OK if you have a cock as big as a Black and Decker drill, which needs wrapping round your waist to contain it, and which no woman can take, to then shove it up a 13 year old boy’s crack and splatter the sheets with blood and faeces? (Obviously yes, or the word scatology wouldn’t exist). Because it was all in the minds eye: just a story that hey, didn’t really happen? Is it obscene to imagine it or is it obscene to berate someone for imagining it? That is the question.
In ‘Too much Flesh and Jabez’, the former is the cock and the latter the 13 year old boy. Both of which ostensibly don’t exist.
An ageing spinster, Ethel, withered to a husk from never having experienced the balm of another human being’s touch, recollects her passion for one of her pupils from when she was a teacher. So she writes a story: a swansong, a purge the purdah outpouring of all the collected rage, bitter regret, unspent passion and wasted opportunities of a life mislived. Centerstage is Jim, the object of her unrequited ‘love’, and enveloping him from all sides are a bevy of twisted, tortured, demonic characters, tearing at his sexuality, each and everyone a simulacrum of sorts of Ethel. All her unfulfilled yearnings erupt in an obscene medley of teatro grotesco:a raw, gut wrenching, emotionally charged mind fuck, in which sex is always a method of punishment.
Underscoring this steaming inferno of taboos, like a promise of a winter’s sigh, is unrelenting despair: its in the DNA of this book.
I’m left really, with one super clear image in the aftermath of all this emotional and physical gore: Steven Covey’s urge to imagine myself 30 years from now, in my deathbed, casting an eye back on my life: what do I regret doing, and not doing? What am I putting off, which might only come back to haunt me as my very own Jabez? And to do it.
In ‘Too much Flesh and Jabez’, the former is the cock and the latter the 13 year old boy. Both of which ostensibly don’t exist.
An ageing spinster, Ethel, withered to a husk from never having experienced the balm of another human being’s touch, recollects her passion for one of her pupils from when she was a teacher. So she writes a story: a swansong, a purge the purdah outpouring of all the collected rage, bitter regret, unspent passion and wasted opportunities of a life mislived. Centerstage is Jim, the object of her unrequited ‘love’, and enveloping him from all sides are a bevy of twisted, tortured, demonic characters, tearing at his sexuality, each and everyone a simulacrum of sorts of Ethel. All her unfulfilled yearnings erupt in an obscene medley of teatro grotesco:a raw, gut wrenching, emotionally charged mind fuck, in which sex is always a method of punishment.
Underscoring this steaming inferno of taboos, like a promise of a winter’s sigh, is unrelenting despair: its in the DNA of this book.
I’m left really, with one super clear image in the aftermath of all this emotional and physical gore: Steven Covey’s urge to imagine myself 30 years from now, in my deathbed, casting an eye back on my life: what do I regret doing, and not doing? What am I putting off, which might only come back to haunt me as my very own Jabez? And to do it.
October 14, 2014
Given its beautiful and masterful writing, its impeccable and suggestive structure, its southern gothic atmosphere, and its very touching and psychologically penetrating nature I’d expect this book to be better known and more widely read than it is by now, 35 years after its initial publication; but then I suppose it would be better known and more widely read if it didn’t feature a main character whose cock is so monstrously large that women run in terror from it, landing in the madhouse or shriveled spinsterhood, and that features a device called the “short pecker” that he must wear to have congress with his wife, and that to top it all culminates in this monstrous cock cornholing a 14 year old boy. Yes, it’s a rather scandalous and explicit book, but really only in précis as it’s told with such exuberance and tenderness that the scandalous explicitness has more the air of an innocent fable than pornography. This exuberance and tenderness is no doubt due to the framing device of the novel in which we learn that the fable of the monstrous cock was written by an virgin spinster ex-teacher who once tutored the man of the (fictional) monstrous cock when he was a teen, and had lived her subsequent life fantasizing about his virility and the potentials of his mind.
It is a book about repression and its consequent untameable feelings and desires, and how these feelings and desires struggle along in the world. It is about the inner battle between “fascism” (the fascism of a teacher who must assume a despotic role to teach) and compassion, as in the end it seems what the virgin spinster really wants is for the man/boy of the monstrous cock to realize his intellectual potential, the cock standing in for the mind. It is about how repression perverts into wild fantasy and how that wild fantasy can lead to a kind of autumnal satisfaction as it gives the fantasizer the crazy courage to face the object of her fantasies, and to share her fantasies with said object, dying in a chaste orgasmic swoon as he turns the final page, and with this final swoon finally getting across the substance and necessity of her fascistic compassion and so possibly (at any rate she did all that was in her power) helping the monstrous cock to achieve his/its potential height (and length and girth) and so transcend his hardscrabble poor white environment.
It is a book about repression and its consequent untameable feelings and desires, and how these feelings and desires struggle along in the world. It is about the inner battle between “fascism” (the fascism of a teacher who must assume a despotic role to teach) and compassion, as in the end it seems what the virgin spinster really wants is for the man/boy of the monstrous cock to realize his intellectual potential, the cock standing in for the mind. It is about how repression perverts into wild fantasy and how that wild fantasy can lead to a kind of autumnal satisfaction as it gives the fantasizer the crazy courage to face the object of her fantasies, and to share her fantasies with said object, dying in a chaste orgasmic swoon as he turns the final page, and with this final swoon finally getting across the substance and necessity of her fascistic compassion and so possibly (at any rate she did all that was in her power) helping the monstrous cock to achieve his/its potential height (and length and girth) and so transcend his hardscrabble poor white environment.
June 29, 2012
An excellent novel and the ninth title Dalkey ever published. You want a five-star review? See this man. You want a four-star review? See this woman. You want a three-star review? See this hermaphrodite. You want an even longer four-star review? See this zebra. You want a review from me? See you later.
July 3, 2012
A kind of meta-erotica dissecting desire and its projection onto and through others, largely via literature. Our narrator, an aging ex-school-teacher, obsessing over a past student of, she thinks, unrealized potential, begins to write a novel about him which is quickly taken over by (or arises from, really) prurient fantasy. She finds herself in multiple characters as the story progresses, her desires spilling out all over the pages, but where then does Coleman Dowell find himself, and his desires? Some of these seem obvious, some less so. Despite its subject, this would seem to be Dowell's "hit" and it's clear why: despite the meta-narrative toying, the actual story is pretty direct, its emotions raw and honest. If at a few points they seemed to spill over into artifice, it's difficult to say whose wish fulfillment it is that is mucking things up, and any answer falls well within the thematic operating theater the book delineates, thus preemptively protecting the story from this being a problem.
Nothing, apparently, can hit the masterful sprawl of Island People, but this is a crisp confirmation of Coleman Dowells skill and the tragic-ness of his generally unremembered place in literature.
Do you want a gender-confused map to other review options? Try here.
Nothing, apparently, can hit the masterful sprawl of Island People, but this is a crisp confirmation of Coleman Dowells skill and the tragic-ness of his generally unremembered place in literature.
Do you want a gender-confused map to other review options? Try here.
He saw all of his life--old thoughts and aspirations--go rushing past him like long pent-up cattle out of a barn. He had not--this was a killer--until that minute had an idea of the vastness that can lie coiled inside a small act. He was not talking about sex, which was not small, but was part of the vastness. He meant the small act of saying "hello" to someone and following that up with other small acts: working together, going to the store together, eating together, tending each other through a bad cold, one person hiring another, befriending another, showing interest in another person.
The whole area of human relationship was trapped like a wood in winter. Only a hermit, living on a barren mountain or plain, was safe.
November 28, 2010
The general outline of the book has been touched upon in the description and prior reviews. It is well written and an overall enjoyable read. But, I wonder if it really works after thinking about it. I now find the plot, both of the frame and the story at 1st glance somewhat silly and illogical.
- A high school teacher takes a special interest in a student and tries to broaden his horizons. The kid imagines an erotic interest on her part which she feels, but doesn't respond to for many reasons. And then she writes a story about his life from his marriage to the present with his humongous penis being the protagonist of the story. This story includes details about a frigid wife who claims he's too big, to his sodomizing a 14 y/o 'hustler' because the latter finally found one big enough, to a payoff of a blackmailer who suspects his 'child' abuse. Where did this school teacher get all of the details of Jim's life? SHe didn't. It a story, imagined, a possible life. There's more to the opening frame which details Miss Ethel's post-retirement musings.
- Miss Ethel's story: Big, young, masculine, straight Southern farmer (Jim) is sexually frustrated because his wife is frigid. He uses a penis shortening device to mollify her discomfort, but it becomes clear she just doesn't like 'doing it'. Men are mysterious to Effie. So like all frustrated rural guys he uses any available hole for relief - a hole in the ground, his hand hole or the cows or an adolescent boy's anus. The boy (Jabez) is as petite as the wife. He can take it without the device, but the wife can't take it either way. Lack of desire is the obvious reason. So we have a horny teen/man and a frigid wife. A side thread of what happens if Jim gets caught with the boy and attempted blackmail by the kid's aunt are explored briefly. The story per se is rather trite, IMO. I mean it's been done many, many times.
Jabez (Hebrew for "he makes sorrowful"***) is the most interesting character. At least the story becomes interesting when he appears. He's mysterious, possibly tends toward insanity like his sister, is all to manipulative for a 14 y/o—well most 14 y/o's. And, I really wanted to know his history and what happens to him after this novel. I would like to see him fleshed out, so to speak. And Ethel as Jabez is her most satisfied aspect, the most "free from pain".
The end frame explains the logic of the novel. On her deathbed, talking to Jim, the teacher says, "I have written a life that could have put you behind bars, if lived." Thus, making the body of the book a pure fiction from the imagination of a virgin spinster, who wanted Jim all these years. "Finally, woman of the world, she had led him to her bed." And Jim thought about "fuckin' her to death". Each of the characters, but Jim, is an aspect of Miss Ethel, thus we have an old, repressed lady's private memoirs.
Without the frames, the story is just a common vignette about sexual repression. With the frames, the novel becomes a dark piece about a woman who never lived, a love's labour's lost and died a failure.
_______
***1 Chronicles 4:9-11
9 Jabez was more honorable than his brothers. His mother had named him Jabez, saying, “I gave birth to him in pain.”
10 Jabez cried out to the God of Israel, “Oh, that you would bless me and enlarge my territory! Let your hand be with me, and keep me from harm so that I will be free from pain.” And God granted his request.
- A high school teacher takes a special interest in a student and tries to broaden his horizons. The kid imagines an erotic interest on her part which she feels, but doesn't respond to for many reasons. And then she writes a story about his life from his marriage to the present with his humongous penis being the protagonist of the story. This story includes details about a frigid wife who claims he's too big, to his sodomizing a 14 y/o 'hustler' because the latter finally found one big enough, to a payoff of a blackmailer who suspects his 'child' abuse. Where did this school teacher get all of the details of Jim's life? SHe didn't. It a story, imagined, a possible life. There's more to the opening frame which details Miss Ethel's post-retirement musings.
- Miss Ethel's story: Big, young, masculine, straight Southern farmer (Jim) is sexually frustrated because his wife is frigid. He uses a penis shortening device to mollify her discomfort, but it becomes clear she just doesn't like 'doing it'. Men are mysterious to Effie. So like all frustrated rural guys he uses any available hole for relief - a hole in the ground, his hand hole or the cows or an adolescent boy's anus. The boy (Jabez) is as petite as the wife. He can take it without the device, but the wife can't take it either way. Lack of desire is the obvious reason. So we have a horny teen/man and a frigid wife. A side thread of what happens if Jim gets caught with the boy and attempted blackmail by the kid's aunt are explored briefly. The story per se is rather trite, IMO. I mean it's been done many, many times.
Jabez (Hebrew for "he makes sorrowful"***) is the most interesting character. At least the story becomes interesting when he appears. He's mysterious, possibly tends toward insanity like his sister, is all to manipulative for a 14 y/o—well most 14 y/o's. And, I really wanted to know his history and what happens to him after this novel. I would like to see him fleshed out, so to speak. And Ethel as Jabez is her most satisfied aspect, the most "free from pain".
The end frame explains the logic of the novel. On her deathbed, talking to Jim, the teacher says, "I have written a life that could have put you behind bars, if lived." Thus, making the body of the book a pure fiction from the imagination of a virgin spinster, who wanted Jim all these years. "Finally, woman of the world, she had led him to her bed." And Jim thought about "fuckin' her to death". Each of the characters, but Jim, is an aspect of Miss Ethel, thus we have an old, repressed lady's private memoirs.
Without the frames, the story is just a common vignette about sexual repression. With the frames, the novel becomes a dark piece about a woman who never lived, a love's labour's lost and died a failure.
_______
***1 Chronicles 4:9-11
9 Jabez was more honorable than his brothers. His mother had named him Jabez, saying, “I gave birth to him in pain.”
10 Jabez cried out to the God of Israel, “Oh, that you would bless me and enlarge my territory! Let your hand be with me, and keep me from harm so that I will be free from pain.” And God granted his request.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 8, 2011
i fergot i read this, til looking at the coleman dowell irish literature series by dalkey. southern Gothic at its finest. who'd a thunk it that kentucky could bring to mind such a story as this? but it's true, it really is.
May 10, 2013
I have discovered a new, amazing, author. What he says of his character Jabez, can also be said of himself:
He's experienced.
He has a mind.
He seduced me and took his time doing it.
He's good company.
He makes me think.
Knowing him has changed me forever.
He's experienced.
He has a mind.
He seduced me and took his time doing it.
He's good company.
He makes me think.
Knowing him has changed me forever.
March 25, 2014
"What are you reading?"
"My big dick book."
Everyone who asked this and received my reply during my meandering through this novel thought I was making a big joke. But honestly the entire book is a big joke, a big dick joke. The main character, Jim, has a dick that is a burden. His wife is too small for it, so he has sex with the ground and the cows and apparently a young boy that seduces him until he can't stand it anymore. In the end, the big joke is really a big joke on us. The reader knows that this is a fictional tale written by a retired spinster, whom tutored Jim when he was younger and the big dick joke is her way of dealing with the sadness of having a life incomplete. In the end, after going through the pages and pages of big dick, Dowell turns it back to reality and how that story is really a horrible cry of sadness, that the big dick is really a metaphor of all of the things that was keeping Jim away from the school teacher and how if it was possible, death would be a little sweeter, a little more filled with dirty sex and adventure than just to lie yearning for a life that did not exist.
In the end, this is the morality that plays out with many novels deal with as a main theme. Through the disappointment of a life that did not turn out the way that you wanted, and now lying on a death bed, the end of your life filled with the things you wish you would have done, it manifests into many different types of narrative. In this case, the narrative turns into a story about a huge dick. And honestly, it could be much worse.
"My big dick book."
Everyone who asked this and received my reply during my meandering through this novel thought I was making a big joke. But honestly the entire book is a big joke, a big dick joke. The main character, Jim, has a dick that is a burden. His wife is too small for it, so he has sex with the ground and the cows and apparently a young boy that seduces him until he can't stand it anymore. In the end, the big joke is really a big joke on us. The reader knows that this is a fictional tale written by a retired spinster, whom tutored Jim when he was younger and the big dick joke is her way of dealing with the sadness of having a life incomplete. In the end, after going through the pages and pages of big dick, Dowell turns it back to reality and how that story is really a horrible cry of sadness, that the big dick is really a metaphor of all of the things that was keeping Jim away from the school teacher and how if it was possible, death would be a little sweeter, a little more filled with dirty sex and adventure than just to lie yearning for a life that did not exist.
In the end, this is the morality that plays out with many novels deal with as a main theme. Through the disappointment of a life that did not turn out the way that you wanted, and now lying on a death bed, the end of your life filled with the things you wish you would have done, it manifests into many different types of narrative. In this case, the narrative turns into a story about a huge dick. And honestly, it could be much worse.
March 24, 2009
Southern Gothic with the framing device of it being written by a spinster schoolteacher based on a student of hers. In her story, a man is too well-endowed to have sex with his wife, but finds an outlet with a sexually ambiguous boy.
January 21, 2016
This is one of the best books I've read in ages. Coleman Dowell should be a household name off the strength of this novel alone. That he took his own life is heartbreaking...
May 1, 2023
This is Coleman Dowell’s fourth novel. Dowell, a sadly overlooked author, took his own life in 1985.
The premise is it’s a manuscript written by Miss Ethel, a spinster schoolteacher – a revenge novel about a former student that apparently she had the hots for, but is it really? Is it revenge or wish fulfillment? An erotic novel about an overly endowed young Kentucky farmer, his painfully inhibited wife, and an outrageously provocative teen-age boy. Set on the homefront, during the Second World War, Jim Cummins has all the problems of running his farm almost single-handedly, while wearing a bull harness when having sex with his wife. When Effie has to go home for a bit to attend a wedding, her friend Helen Taylor suggests taking on her nephew Jabez to help with chores and Jay uses his proximity to Jim to come on to him, or is it the reverse? For a while one doesn’t know what is reality and what is imagined in this somewhat perverse tale. Brief enough not to get hung up unduly in its intricacies, it shows Dowell at one of his most interesting points a few years before he decided to throw in the towel and himself from a fifteenth-floor balcony in Manhattan at age sixty.
The premise is it’s a manuscript written by Miss Ethel, a spinster schoolteacher – a revenge novel about a former student that apparently she had the hots for, but is it really? Is it revenge or wish fulfillment? An erotic novel about an overly endowed young Kentucky farmer, his painfully inhibited wife, and an outrageously provocative teen-age boy. Set on the homefront, during the Second World War, Jim Cummins has all the problems of running his farm almost single-handedly, while wearing a bull harness when having sex with his wife. When Effie has to go home for a bit to attend a wedding, her friend Helen Taylor suggests taking on her nephew Jabez to help with chores and Jay uses his proximity to Jim to come on to him, or is it the reverse? For a while one doesn’t know what is reality and what is imagined in this somewhat perverse tale. Brief enough not to get hung up unduly in its intricacies, it shows Dowell at one of his most interesting points a few years before he decided to throw in the towel and himself from a fifteenth-floor balcony in Manhattan at age sixty.
December 2, 2020
Like the (embedded) protagonist in this novel, I read this incredible story about lust and how it shapes various fantasies and social personalities all in one sitting.
Wow. I feel the same way I felt decades ago after reading another novel about lust as a teenager: Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. Completely drained and simultaneously invigorated. Reading coming as close to sex as possible.
Like other reviewers here on Goodreads, I'm left wondering how a novel this good is so obscure? How is a writer this good not more well-known? Glad that has been remedied for me -- I'm going on a Dowell-binge.
Wow. I feel the same way I felt decades ago after reading another novel about lust as a teenager: Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. Completely drained and simultaneously invigorated. Reading coming as close to sex as possible.
Like other reviewers here on Goodreads, I'm left wondering how a novel this good is so obscure? How is a writer this good not more well-known? Glad that has been remedied for me -- I'm going on a Dowell-binge.
January 3, 2024
(meta)Heterosexuality filtered through a homosexual lens. Is this a genre? Becomes it’s one of my favorites. Nobody writes sexually deviant straights quite like gay people do. What if a gay man imagined what a horny straight spinster virgin imagined what a straight well-hung farmer who was forced by his frigirator wife to become Jabez-sexual, would do? Laced through with slow-cooked gothic Southern prose. Definitely a book for those wondering whose holding us accountable for our desires. Our dreams.
November 10, 2022
There were times it was hard to keep up with the author. Until I read the final 3 pages this book was going to be 3 stars. The ending took me a bit by surprise and endeared me to the he story and it’s characters
January 8, 2008
Takes a while to grab you; the voice is extremely leisurely and stagnating for most of the first half, but once Jabez's voice enters the story it comes alive. Before that point it can be a drowsy read, though steeped in a morbid Southernness that may keep you reading (it did me) if your tastes run in that direction. If you're looking for gay porn (based on the synopsis) looks elsewhere: it's not about sex; it's about longing (no pun intended [much]).
January 2, 2025
Very strange book. Mostly I was taken aback because I just wasn’t expecting absolutely anything that occurred in this book. I personally was so confused that I thought the end of the book was a plot twist but looking at other reviews apparently it wasn’t lol. Let’s just say this book is different, extremely different than anything I read. I personally think it should have more popularity. I think it would not only be extremely controversial but unpack sexual repression out in the open.
August 26, 2016
A sort of metaphysical, hyper-sexual Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, in which the schoolteacher with fascistic ambitions satiates her desire to actualise her pupil's 'potential', through the act of writing.
March 26, 2016
Masterful, meticulous metafiction.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews