When I first set out to reread The Pussy by Delicious Tacos, I thought, “My God, I forgot how good this was.”
A few days later I thought, “My God, I forgot how stale and repetitive this was.”
Which makes The Pussy a difficult book to review. There are moments of brilliance in the book. There are moments of searing honesty that would do credit to any writer. But there are also moments where the writer goes beyond searing honesty and ventures into being unpleasant for the sake of being unpleasant. And there are all too many moments where the reader has to think, “This is just the 27th variation on the same story you've already told, Mr Tacos. Don't get me wrong though, it was good and revelatory the first time you told it, though.”
Which might not be a flaw in The Pussy itself. Published in 2016, this short story collection was really an incredible piece of work. Following in the vein of other misanthropic womanizers like Charles Bukowski and Michel Houellebecq, it showed a generation of young writers that it's possible to write fiction about male sexuality in an honest way.
But looking at The Pussy from the vantage point of 2024, it really just drives home the point that Mr Tacos has a bit of a limited literary imagination. His novel Finally Some Good News and his follow-up short story collection Savage Spear of the Unicorn go over the same territory in much the same way. More pussy chasing, more struggles with drugs and alcohol, more complaints about work, more leering at underage girls, etc.
There's an old adage that says the little quirks about a person that you fall in love with are the same little quirks that annoy you once you fall out of love with them. Something like that is going on here. So while The Pussy might have been a tight young piece of work in 2016, after eight years it's looser and starting to show its wrinkles.
The Pussy
The Pussy is a collection of short stories, mostly in first person, mostly following the everyday activities of a narrator who comes across as a fictionalized version of the author. He lives in LA, works some bullshit job, does a lot of drugs and drinking, starts attending AA meetings, ogles some women, sleeps with some women, and he has a pet cat. Over the course of the book he laments the decline of OkCupid, complains about Tinder, rails against capitalism and the human race as a whole, and does some bird watching.
The book gives us a close look inside the mind of this narrator, but there really aren't any other characters. There are women, a few of whom have names, and there are even some names that recur now and then over the course of the book. There are doctors, there's an AA sponsor who shows up now and again, and there are neighbors who show up here and there to annoy the narrator. But as far as actual characters with actual personalities, we really only have our narrator.
Which maybe you could say makes The Pussy a solipsistic piece of work. I'm not saying it makes it bad. More that if you're looking for a writer with genuine sympathy for suffering humanity, you won't find it here. Our narrator routinely tells us human beings are fiendishly selfish creatures who will exercise any cruelty at their disposal on anyone who shows the slightest weakness. That they'll never help you out or give you anything unless they can see you don't need it. And so on.
Which might be more interesting if the narrator showed any self-awareness about what holding such a view of humanity really tells us. But he doesn't, he just whines about it now and then.
Again, I'm not saying any of this makes The Pussy a bad book. The main job of fiction is to be interesting enough for us to follow willingly from the first page to the last page. And whatever you could say about the worldview the book expresses, it's not boring.
The Good
So I've been whaling on the book for a few paragraphs now, I know. But I really do like this book and find it intermittently brilliant. Let's talk about that.
The Pussy is at its best at the beginning and at the end. At the beginning you get some really imaginative, surreal, almost science fiction stories that are really the best the book has to offer.
“Autopilot” is the best story in the book, hands down. Here Mr Tacos takes his schtick of complaining about work and makes it into a genuine surrealist science fictional masterpiece. Set in a world where a new drug makes it possible for people to form no new memories in the workplace, it almost seems utopian. You don't have to remember anything that happens at work, so work is no longer a burden. And you even do better at your job because you don't care what happens at work. Of course, things go wrong in a wonderful way and the end of the story comes like a punch in the gut.
Perfect, really. Wonderful. Everything good in Delicious Tacos’ work in its most concentrated form.
“Product Review: Tenga® Easy Beat Egg™ Artificial Vagina, ‘Silky’” is another standout. The thing that makes the early stories in this collection so good is that while there may be long passages about sexual desire and how horrible women are, there's still a real romantic yearning here. This story tells the (truly touching) tale of a man who falls in love with a single-use sex toy. The life they build together, etc. And while there's a lot to be said about the subtext of this surreal story, it doesn't come off as crude or cynical. It's really sweet and genuinely moving.
Mr Tacos is also undeniably brilliant at expressing sexual desire. The sheer hatred you can feel for a woman over the simple fact that you desire her. The way you spend the whole of your adult life trying to make up for the fact that you weren't good with girls as a teenager, even though you know nothing will ever be enough to make up for that feeling of having been cut off. The strangeness of desire: “They didn’t fuck anymore. He cared about her too much. You have to want to hurt somebody to fuck them.”
The way the one you like never likes you back: “You get girls so you can feel something. But you can only get girls if you feel nothing.”
The parts about the cat at the end are very good too, and deeply sad.
The Bad
What's bad about The Pussy is exactly what's good about The Pussy. There's a lot in there, and what's fresh and striking on page 20 has become the same old trick by page 200. Plus the book is front-loaded with its best stories–somewhere along the line the book loses the flights of imagination and romantic yearning that sweetened the bitterness and made it magical.
The book becomes a collection of “just another” stories. Just another one about looking at girls in the park and how you feel like a mutant when they don't look back at you. Just another one about how much it sucks to get sober. Just another one about how much you can't stand your job.
While Mr Tacos may be good at what he does, the simple fact of the matter is that he doesn't do all that much. Read any one of his books and you've read all of his books.
So: is The Pussy worth reading? Sure. It's better than most of what's out there these days. It expresses pretty universal feelings men have about sex and about women, but which don't get expressed anywhere else. It now and then opens up in a poetic and imaginative style you really wish Mr Tacos would develop more fully. He seems to have pigeonholed himself as the guy who writes edgy sex stuff, though, so it's unlikely he'll take things in a new direction in the future.
But there's always hope.
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