From Publishers Weekly
The three jaded, wealthy protagonists of Kelman's sexually explicit debut have spent a lifetime battling other men for money and status in the cutthroat business world. Having sold their souls for the kind of success that spells easy access to women, they find they're less drawn to them than they ought to be-instead, they prefer enthusiastic young girls, who have not yet become the calculating gold diggers that adult women are. Fortunately, there are plenty of dewy-often underage-strippers, prostitutes, club kids, daughters' friends, friends' daughters and miscellaneous nymphets eager to have their innocence despoiled by middle-aged men with sports cars and Cuban cigars. Kelman chronicles the resulting debaucheries in minute detail, writing in a detached second-person voice that barely individuates his nameless male characters and often reduces the female characters to anatomical figments of a collective male libido. Amid all the sex there is a commentary on sexual politics drawn from snippets of sociobiology, statistics on the prevalence of divorce and infidelity and philosophical ruminations on the origins and linguistic indeterminacy of dirty words. The whole is given a mythic overlay by the insertion of excerpts from Homer, in which warriors confront each other at spear point for the possession of slave girls, archetypes in the dog-eat-dog struggle for power and women that is the essence of a man's life. Kelman's blend of Penthouse-grade sexual transgression, Nietzschean bombast and Sinatra-esque rue is a vigorous rendering of a certain misogynist mindset of masculine privilege, but for all its artfulness, it never quite transcends the cliches it wants to dissect. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
This sure-to-be-controversial first novel is told entirely in the second person by a series of nameless, interchangeable high-level businessmen. All of them share a predilection for young girls, which they describe in pornographic detail. A banker on a business trip to Korea follows the advice of his older boss and orders a hooker from room service. He is shocked by the fact that she is barely out of adolescence, but that seems to fuel his passion, and although he knows he should feel guilty, instead he feels fantastic. A CEO who is vacationing with family friends starts having sex with their teenage daughter; his obsession leads to his own divorce and a lawsuit from his former friends. Kelman's scenarios have an undeniable erotic charge, which he then defuses with innumerable quotes from the Iliad, whose connection to the story line remains murky. This pretentiousness makes the writing seem dishonest, as if Kelman were trying to distance himself from his amoral characters. Disturbing erotica that is sure to draw requests. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Girls: A Paean FROM THE PUBLISHER
Girls is an erotic spree, a journey into the most forbidden corners of male desire, a story about men who have been rendered numb by their power, who have sacrificed everything for success, who have lost their souls and can find meaning only by living vicariously, obsessively through young women. These are the men who wear a ring that says "Peace" or "Dream More" (which she gave them). But they are not at peace; the ring won't work. These are the men who left their safe lives, their wives; lust sets them free/is like a prison. They have replaced their old dreams with dreams of the girls they yearn for. Because the wide-eyed wonder of youth gives them back a taste of what they've lost.
FROM THE CRITICS
The New York Times
Echoing Lolita, Kelman paints a disturbing composite portrait of men who approach sex with young women as a kind of rejuvenating sacrament.—Ben Sisario
Publishers Weekly
The three jaded, wealthy protagonists of Kelman's sexually explicit debut have spent a lifetime battling other men for money and status in the cutthroat business world. Having sold their souls for the kind of success that spells easy access to women, they find they're less drawn to them than they ought to be-instead, they prefer enthusiastic young girls, who have not yet become the calculating gold diggers that adult women are. Fortunately, there are plenty of dewy-often underage-strippers, prostitutes, club kids, daughters' friends, friends' daughters and miscellaneous nymphets eager to have their innocence despoiled by middle-aged men with sports cars and Cuban cigars. Kelman chronicles the resulting debaucheries in minute detail, writing in a detached second-person voice that barely individuates his nameless male characters and often reduces the female characters to anatomical figments of a collective male libido. Amid all the sex there is a commentary on sexual politics drawn from snippets of sociobiology, statistics on the prevalence of divorce and infidelity and philosophical ruminations on the origins and linguistic indeterminacy of dirty words. The whole is given a mythic overlay by the insertion of excerpts from Homer, in which warriors confront each other at spear point for the possession of slave girls, archetypes in the dog-eat-dog struggle for power and women that is the essence of a man's life. Kelman's blend of Penthouse-grade sexual transgression, Nietzschean bombast and Sinatra-esque rue is a vigorous rendering of a certain misogynist mindset of masculine privilege, but for all its artfulness, it never quite transcends the cliches it wants to dissect. (Oct. 1) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
This unusual work concerns itself with male sexual fantasies and obsessions. Told mostly in the second person, it has no story line as such; instead, it consists mainly of fragments and scenes of explicit sexual encounters with prostitutes, strippers, and young teenage girls, with various couplings and entanglements. The male characters evidently doing, watching, or dreaming all of this are wealthy, spoiled, dot-com-type business executives who see life in terms of power struggles, advantages, egotism, and ostentation. Scattered among the disconnected scenes (which do manage to be graphic and absorbing even though the reader is given little connection to the characters) are quotations from The Iliad, The Odyssey, and other epics, as one digressions on sociological forces and statistical trends in modern society. One admires this first-time novelist for his daring and skill, but the book may have only limited appeal. Recommended for larger collections.-Jim Coan, SUNY at Oneonta Lib. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Power-mad men explain why they thank heaven for little girls. Plying the choppy waters between Lolita and Penthouse Forum, Kelman's debut concerns older men with money who like younger women-girls, essentially. He gives us these men's perspectives in monologues from inside their Master-of-the-Universe minds, and what a grim trip it is. There's the banker who flies to South Korea on business and orders up a young teenaged hooker for an unexpectedly wonderful time: "You wish you felt terrible, in fact. But you don't. Instead you feel fucking fantastic. Reborn." There's the very important older man driving the expensive sports car and wearing $1,000 pants who picks up a college girl and has sex with her in her dorm room because she's not his wife. In the most disturbing storyline here, another, very similar, guy who's staying with his wife at the vacation house of another wealthy couple, starts sleeping with that couple's teenaged daughter and becomes obsessed with her. Kelman relates all this in archly blank, percussive prose that strives to balance the level of its pornographic detail with the light of ugly reality that occasionally glares through, keeping the whole becoming just a well-written fantasy text for dirty old men. If only there were a good reason for all those quotes from the Iliad that pop up like pretentious speed bumps every few pages. Kelman isn't writing stories so much here as, it seems, trying to limn the personality of a certain type of power-hungry male. In this context, the expensive clothing and toys, the dominated wife, and the general amoral attitude are as emblematic as the need to posses the young nymphet. Perhaps the author feels a need to toss other materialinto the mix. So we get not only the Iliad but passages on warfare, etymology, and the battle between the sexes-none of them nearly as illuminating as Kelman seems to think. Troublesome erotica much less meaningful than it makes itself out to be.
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