In My Parents' Bedroom by Barry N. Malzberg

The idea of fucking in the bedroom of my parents has seized me with such tenacity that I can barely keep my tread straight, although at the same time I know now that Joanne is evil and that she is out to destroy me.

Here we have a novel written in 1969 by the great Barry N. Malzberg, the sage of Teaneck, in its 2021 Stark House paperback edition, in which it appears with Malzberg's 1968 Oracle of the Thousand Hands.  (We read an excerpt of Oracle of the Thousand Hands back in 2020, when we discussed--at times with shock and dismay--erotica by major speculative fiction writers including Samuel R. Delany, Ramsey Campbell, Robert Silverberg.)  My Stark House edition includes afterwords by Malzberg that may be of interest to students of Malzberg's work and genre literature in general, with their revelation that In My Parents' Bedroom has autobiographical elements and Malzberg's offhand remarks about other components of his large corpus and about other SF writers like Robert Heinlein and Laurence Janifer.

Both In My Parents' Bedroom and Oracle of the Thousand Hands were first published by Olympia Press, In My Parents' Bedroom in 1971, and are ostensibly sex novels, marketed to people looking for erotica.  There are some sex scenes in In My Parents' Bedroom, and one of the novel's themes is the difficulty and disappointment attendant on sexual relationships, but the book is not particularly titillating or stimulating--it has bigger fish to fry, being a satire of mid-century middle-class family life, but (to my mind, at least) more importantly a satire of academics, their view of the past, and their self-important and ultimately sterile "work," as well as a rumination on the impossibility of anybody truly understanding the past or other people.  The scholars in the novel are obsessed with inconsequential minutiae and argue passionately about unknowable details, including the states of mind of people they have never met, basing their assertions on the flimsiest of evidence; their claims and questionable insights expose more about themselves than about their purported subjects.  In My Parents' Bedroom also has some science fictional elements; near its end we get a "meta" passage about science fiction, and the entire novel paints a faint and oblique portrait of an "enlightened" and "liberated" future society through the expedient of revealing the future people's own prejudices and attitudes in how they talk about the middle of the 20th century, as well as allusive but mysterious references to "ruins."   

"At this time, however, she was a virgin which added, as you can imagine, not only to her guilt, but to that uneasy feeling of excitement which she interpreted as a distant warmth working through her thighs and toes and even parching the nipples of her invisible breasts, which were well concealed under several layers of the dress of that period."

Malzberg fans will not be surprised to learn that this novel is told in the present tense by an unreliable narrator.  Our narrator this time around is Michael Westfield, and he is on a guided tour of a meticulously preserved/rebuilt American one-family house of the middle of the 20th century.  Michael is suffering some severe memory loss--for example, he is accompanied on the tour by his girlfriend, but as the novel begins he can't remember her name, how they met, or the contours of their relationship.  One thing he does know, something that he strives to keep from his girlfriend, the other tourists in the group, and especially the tour guide--the house they are touring is his own childhood home, where he grew up with his parents and sister, and which he hasn't seen in twenty years or so.  As the novel progresses Michael regains some of his memory (his girlfriend's name, Joanne; he and his sister's incestuous sex play) but we also are offered reasons to doubt Michael is who he says he is and that the narrative describes anything beyond the hallucinations or dreams of an unhappily married man.

"Oh, why did we take this tour Michael?  It's so depressing!  These people lived so horribly.  How could people live like this and not kill themselves?"

In My Parents' Bedroom is meant to be funny, and on the tour are some wacky characters.  There is a screaming albino child who is painfully bored by the tour, to which his fat mother and skinny father have dragged him.

"I don't understand this," the albino child says suddenly in a high, whining, rather dreadful voice.  "I don't understand any of this and I don't like it; it has nothing to do with me, why did we come here?  I'm bored, it's all too terrible, let's go somewhere and get an ice cream cone or something else."

(One wonders if this albino child represents the rational response of the ordinary person to being subjected to government-approved history lessons from arrogant and absurd taxpayer-subsidized intellectuals, lessons which do not enrich your life or understanding but just waste your time and make you feel bad.) 

"The tenants in this 'living' room were not so much 'living' as merely 'existing,'" the guide says, running a small hand over the gate, "and indeed some of the eminent philosophers and writers of their time took this one step further to say that actually this was not the case either but that they were in all likelihood 'dying.'"

There is a homosexual couple ("two teenagers in Edwardian dress,") one of whom is a grad student ("the scholar" or "the Ph.D candidate") whose area of study is the sex life of Michael's father and who gets in totally pointless but quite heated arguments with the tour guide, an old man who is repeatedly described as a "civil servant," an opportunity for Malzberg--former employee of the New York welfare department--to poke fun at one of his conventional targets: government workers.  

"Come now," the scholar is saying, "there is absolutely no question of anal fixation whatsoever.  I find it crude, base and completely uninformed of you to make those suggestions.  People of that generation had a far less restricted attitude toward the bathroom function than do you or I, that is all.  They performed their needs simply."

There is not much plot to In My Parents' Bedroom.  The tour proceeds through the house.  Joanne and Michael twice sneak off to have sex in Michael's parents' bed; Joanne initiates these couplings, but is not satisfied by them.  Joanne goes off with an employee of the museum, and in the climax of the novel it is suggested she may have had sex with this other guy.  In this climax Michael's true identity is revealed to the other people on the tour, but then we are given the idea that the whole thing is moot.

I'm a Malzberg fan, but I am going to have to call In My Parents' Bedroom one of his lesser works.  I started it with the hope that it would be as fun and funny as Underlay or The Horizontal Woman or Everything Happened to Susan (AKA Cinema), but found it somewhat tedious and quickly got bogged down and kept putting it aside to focus on my other hobbies, like working on my model trains or reading NSFW comics about the challenging emotional lives of Japanese high school girls.  The jokes are not bad, but they aren't great, there is almost no plot and almost no dramatic tension, and, word-for-word, quite little ideological or philosophical content.  (Compare to a novel like Herovit's World, which had a surfeit of literary criticism and human relationship stuff for me to sink my teeth into.)   

To be fair to Malzberg, it does seem like after 1000 blog posts (!) that my interest in reading fiction and blogging about it has waned a bit.  ("It's not you, Barry--it's me.")  Also, looking back on the novel having read it, trying to process what it was all about and flipping through its 110 or so pages looking for quotes to buttress my claims, is proving to be more fun and intriguing than was actually reading it front to back.  

I'm going to grade this novel "acceptable" and warn prospective readers that In My Parents' Bedroom is real modern-type literature, consisting of dirty jokes, long descriptions of psychological states and bootless philosophical argumentation, all of it unreliable, contradictory and ambiguous--a big theme of the novel is human inability to really know anything--and very little plot development or action.  It really threatens to become the kind of boring and depressing experience it seems to be satirizing.  Not bad, but there are over a dozen superior Malzberg novels out there, running the gamut from SF to horror to mainstream so I would steer readers to them and only recommend In My Parents' Bedroom to grizzled Malzberg veterans interested in exploring every nook and cranny of our hero's vast body of work.          

"I don't think your question makes any sense," the Ph.D. candidate says, flicking some imagined dust off a sleeve.  "Of course she enjoyed it.  In those unfortunate times women were objects and those responses which were expected were elicited.  Rather we should concern ourselves--"

"Some Coke with ice," the albino says, "and let's go for a walk.  It's so boring!  It doesn't have anything to do with anyone!"