Diana: A Diary in the Second Person.

In his interesting introduction Russell Smith makes it clear that this novella is a serious literary experiment in pornography. Using second person narration (“You arch your back and bend your knees…”) he produces both distance and insistence on the action happening, action he asserts is a fictionalized compendium of stories women have told him about their fantasies.

Diana differs from conventional porn because it tries to convey sexual experience from inside Diana’s senses rather than presenting an externalized, “filmed voyeur” experience. Its language is brutal and blunt, seeking to avoid cliché wherever possible. It is often a narrative of dominance and submission in both psychological and physical senses, but it lacks the tired repetition of straight “dom” narratives. Moreover, Diana is taken by the power of Patrice’s ability to excite her but he then largely withdraws from the story, leaving her to try and fill his absence through various pornographic adventures. When he reappears near the end of the tale the reader is faced with one of the true cruxes of a narrative on this subject: is intense sexual experience the real root of complex “love” relationships. It is the reader who is faced with this conundrum. Smith presents and, in the tradition of all quality pornography, the reader must respond.

Diana is an unusual and thoughtful book, whose exciting surfaces, once penetrated, lead to real questions about the place of sexual experience in human life.