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Yet to Come
Decades before #metoo, Cal chose his punishment for going too far with a girl he was crazy about: a life-sentence with a woman he could not love, whose frequent rages, untapped spending and ruthless children were his means to distract himself from longing and regret. The girl from his past also condemned him to periodic postcards bearing no return address. Rather than increasing his despair, the postcards helped stoke the imaginary life he maintained with her, including dialogue about his plight, images of her showing up while he plays his sax in a nightclub, and even sex, the very realm that had initiated her retreat from him.
326 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2020
1 person want to read
About the author
Cris Mazza
38 books29 followersCris Mazza is the author of a dozen books of fiction, mostly recently Waterbaby (Soft Skull Press 2007). Her other titles include the critically acclaimed Is It Sexual Harassment Yet?, and the PEN Nelson Algren Award winning How to Leave a Country. She also has a collection of personal essays, Indigenous: Growing Up Californian. Mazza has been the recipient of an NEA Fellowship and three Illinois Arts Council literary awards. A native of Southern California, Mazza grew up in San Diego County. Currently she lives 50 miles west of Chicago. She is a professor in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago "
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
February 2, 2021
You don’t have to watch a lot of porn to come across a ton of bad puns on the meanings of “come.” You will also find them used by many a would-be Lothario on any internet dating site. In a way, these people are doing everyone else a favor by self-identifying as the dumb ones you want to stay away from. Everyone recognizes “cum/come” jokes as bad, so it’s surprising to realize that Cris Mazza’s novel Yet to Come is a literary novel that gets its title from just such a low-brow joke. It’s a bigger surprise to realize how well she pulls it off.
This is a story of two would-be/should-be lovers who spend a lifetime apart through their own bad timing and bad choices. It’s Remains of the Day meets The Story of O. Why The Story of O? Because the glue that holds this story together is Lexie, who is possibly asexual during a time when nobody knew what that was. She’s an inverted image of O from The Story of O, the novel about sexual awakening in which O learns her own power by giving her sexual agency away, becoming powerful by relinquishing her power. Lexie only becomes “Lexie” on the last page of the novel. Prior to that, she is “X,” the opposite to “O,” and X becomes more frightened and powerless as the story goes on. Just as the “O” symbolized openness, Lexie’s “X” represents how closed she remains, staying in contact with Cal, her star-crossed childhood sweetheart, but only a one-sided contact in which she never lets him communicate back to her.
She is anorgasmic, or unable to have orgasms, hence the title of the book. She doesn’t really desire sex, which doomed her early relationship with Cal, who did. Although she is likely asexual, she is not aromantic, because she feels a connection to Cal that stays through the decades of their abusive marriages to other people.
The back cover of the book makes this sound like a #metoo story long before #metoo, as though Cal’s marriage to his terrible wife—whose name, Virginia, is also rife with sexual double meaning—is punishment for having assaulted X. That’s not really what happened, though. As X herself puts it, the most Cal was guilty of was going “too far, too fast.” They didn’t have sex in the early days of their relationship. They had two bad makeout sessions, one that ended in Cal digitally penetrating her and the other that stopped just before X’s front door after a night of making out together. It was more than she wanted, but when Cal realized that, he stopped.
From then on, Cal lives nearly a sexless life. He marries Virginia and tries to care in a way for her horrible offspring because he hopes that by caring for others, he can fill up the void in his own life. His saxophone and his fantasies about X become his only outlets for his sublimated sexual desires. In some cases, he combines the two, imagining himself playing the sax in a sexual way for X: “His last note is held, throbbing, and he opens his eyes and meets hers.” He avoids sex with Virginia as much as possible, so much that when she becomes pregnant twice (both end in ectopic pregnancies), they really do seem to be immaculate conceptions. Or, possibly, we get one hint, it may have been that our “virgin” was visited, like Mary, by an angel. There are some hints that her relationship to her son, Angel, was “not normal” in more than one sense.
Cal is the character the story most focuses on, and there are some painful scenes of him allowing himself to be abused. The weakest part of the novel may be how cartoonish Virginia is: she is almost impossibly stupid, dropping what must have been over a hundred malapropisms that just defy probability—at some point, just by luck, it seems she would have gotten a few expressions right. She is an excellent cook, and I had hoped she might find some redemption eventually with cooking as an outlet. But the closest the novel gets to a (literary) climax is when her catering business fails to launch. There is almost too much contempt heaped on Virginia.
But that doesn’t ruin the novel by a longshot. Although X warns us that “there will be no victorious orgasm at the end,” what we get might be almost as satisfying. To get there, X has to realize that her fundamental character trait is fear. It was fear that led her to the safety of her bad marriage, and fear may be what is behind her anorgasmia. (It isn’t entirely clear she’s completely asexual; she still hasn’t been with anyone she loves enough to really test the theory.)
She needs to get over her fear without sex, which, narratively, means an epiphany without a climax. She muses at one point that pithy truisms do no good unless people understand them, and that the reality is that a lot of the problems people face come from their own choices. The brilliant turn in this novel is how its characters quietly change for the better. It’s not the blinding light of epiphany; it’s the quiet decision to listen to your own advice and make better choices.
X’s turn for the better, in fact, doesn’t come until she literally loses her climax—she has to put down her dog she has named, ironically, for the thing she can’t have.
In real life, people don’t generally have epiphanies with blinding, orgasmic lights. Life doesn’t build to a satisfying climax, the way we’re all taught stories should. Cal and X’s cycle is something harder to carve out, harder to write, and possibly more satisfying. Well, more satisfying, at least, than the narrative kind of climax. Mazza’s wisdom should keep readers cumming back for more.
This is a story of two would-be/should-be lovers who spend a lifetime apart through their own bad timing and bad choices. It’s Remains of the Day meets The Story of O. Why The Story of O? Because the glue that holds this story together is Lexie, who is possibly asexual during a time when nobody knew what that was. She’s an inverted image of O from The Story of O, the novel about sexual awakening in which O learns her own power by giving her sexual agency away, becoming powerful by relinquishing her power. Lexie only becomes “Lexie” on the last page of the novel. Prior to that, she is “X,” the opposite to “O,” and X becomes more frightened and powerless as the story goes on. Just as the “O” symbolized openness, Lexie’s “X” represents how closed she remains, staying in contact with Cal, her star-crossed childhood sweetheart, but only a one-sided contact in which she never lets him communicate back to her.
She is anorgasmic, or unable to have orgasms, hence the title of the book. She doesn’t really desire sex, which doomed her early relationship with Cal, who did. Although she is likely asexual, she is not aromantic, because she feels a connection to Cal that stays through the decades of their abusive marriages to other people.
The back cover of the book makes this sound like a #metoo story long before #metoo, as though Cal’s marriage to his terrible wife—whose name, Virginia, is also rife with sexual double meaning—is punishment for having assaulted X. That’s not really what happened, though. As X herself puts it, the most Cal was guilty of was going “too far, too fast.” They didn’t have sex in the early days of their relationship. They had two bad makeout sessions, one that ended in Cal digitally penetrating her and the other that stopped just before X’s front door after a night of making out together. It was more than she wanted, but when Cal realized that, he stopped.
From then on, Cal lives nearly a sexless life. He marries Virginia and tries to care in a way for her horrible offspring because he hopes that by caring for others, he can fill up the void in his own life. His saxophone and his fantasies about X become his only outlets for his sublimated sexual desires. In some cases, he combines the two, imagining himself playing the sax in a sexual way for X: “His last note is held, throbbing, and he opens his eyes and meets hers.” He avoids sex with Virginia as much as possible, so much that when she becomes pregnant twice (both end in ectopic pregnancies), they really do seem to be immaculate conceptions. Or, possibly, we get one hint, it may have been that our “virgin” was visited, like Mary, by an angel. There are some hints that her relationship to her son, Angel, was “not normal” in more than one sense.
Cal is the character the story most focuses on, and there are some painful scenes of him allowing himself to be abused. The weakest part of the novel may be how cartoonish Virginia is: she is almost impossibly stupid, dropping what must have been over a hundred malapropisms that just defy probability—at some point, just by luck, it seems she would have gotten a few expressions right. She is an excellent cook, and I had hoped she might find some redemption eventually with cooking as an outlet. But the closest the novel gets to a (literary) climax is when her catering business fails to launch. There is almost too much contempt heaped on Virginia.
But that doesn’t ruin the novel by a longshot. Although X warns us that “there will be no victorious orgasm at the end,” what we get might be almost as satisfying. To get there, X has to realize that her fundamental character trait is fear. It was fear that led her to the safety of her bad marriage, and fear may be what is behind her anorgasmia. (It isn’t entirely clear she’s completely asexual; she still hasn’t been with anyone she loves enough to really test the theory.)
She needs to get over her fear without sex, which, narratively, means an epiphany without a climax. She muses at one point that pithy truisms do no good unless people understand them, and that the reality is that a lot of the problems people face come from their own choices. The brilliant turn in this novel is how its characters quietly change for the better. It’s not the blinding light of epiphany; it’s the quiet decision to listen to your own advice and make better choices.
X’s turn for the better, in fact, doesn’t come until she literally loses her climax—she has to put down her dog she has named, ironically, for the thing she can’t have.
In real life, people don’t generally have epiphanies with blinding, orgasmic lights. Life doesn’t build to a satisfying climax, the way we’re all taught stories should. Cal and X’s cycle is something harder to carve out, harder to write, and possibly more satisfying. Well, more satisfying, at least, than the narrative kind of climax. Mazza’s wisdom should keep readers cumming back for more.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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