The Indelible Awfulness of E. L. James’s <em>The Mister</em>
It is strange, when you pause to think about it, that E. L. James is still out there being as a transgressive, taboo-busting warrior for women’s desire, given that her fictional worlds position female characters somewhere between the saintly Dorothea Brooke and the wimple-wearing Maria von Trapp. Her women are blushing, impoverished virgins, pristine of heart and fragile of appetite; her men, meanwhile, are swaggering Lotharios whose wallets bulge even more conspicuously than their designer underwear. In James’s new book, , the hero is an English earl who’s also a model-slash-DJ-slash-photographer-slash-composer, and whose first page of interior monologue is a vainglorious ode to “mindless sex” and a “nameless fuck.” His name, if you can stomach it, is Maxim Trevelyan. And the ultimate object of his affections, the woman who will ensure the rake’s progress from libidinous playboy to loyal husband, is … his doe-eyed undocumented
