To attempt to summarise the plot of Lofting is to do it a grave misservice. Suffice it to say that it does not stray far from genre conventions. The protagonists are young, rich, successful, incredibly smart and blessed with the sort of verbal dexterity that exists only in the pages of books by young, smart and incredibly clever novelists. The sex is deviant but not outrageously so, there are no boundaries pushed, no limits desolved. No, what makes Lofting stand-out from the crowd is the writing. I can think of no other smut novel which is so full of linguistic twists and turns, where the virtuosity of the language is so central to the book.
The central protagonists - Claire, the narattor, Andres who introduces her to cyber-sex and Nick who is decidedly non-virtual - have a facility with language that is dizzying. It's hard to keep up. At first it's refreshing to see a writer who takes such pleasure with words writing porn. However after a while it palls. The differentiation between the characters starts to blur. It begins to sound like the same voice. This is nowhere more annoying than in the sex scenes. We follow a familiar trajectory of desire and exploration, but the sense of abandon is never fully realised. It's the words. The dense vocabluary, the author/narator's search for the perfect allusion, becomes intrusive at precisely the moment she should be losing herself and her capacity for playing with language for the sake of it. If she cannot abandon her need to find exactly the right phrase then there is no escape from the intellectualism which sexual frenzy seeks to obliterate.
While this is a diverting read, it does not, in the end, stand comparison to those works of literary porn which manage to fully engage both the brain and the body.
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