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Book Review: Fifty Shades of Grey

I still play World of Warcraft. (The reason for this admission will become relevant. Stay with me.)

One of my favorite things to do in WoW is to take one of my high-level, geared healers and go along on low-level dungeons. There's something great about when a tank realizes that unless he does something catastrophically stupid, he can't die. I think of it as a public service.

And that's why I've read Fifty Shades of Grey. As a public service. And so you don't have to.

Fifty Shades of Grey, otherwise known, in some circles, as "mommy porn", started its life as Twilight fan fiction. That's right, boys and girls, it was originally Bella and Edward doing the nasty with duct tape and belt straps. The story goes that the mods of the fan fiction site the stories were posted on took the material down because it wasn't in line with the good ol' fashioned no biting, er, sex until marriage as prescribed by the Mormon church. All the better for author E.L. James, who took her sex fantasies, packaged them into three books, and is now a multi-millionaire.

Fifty Shades of Grey is the first book in the series. It's about a naive recent college grad named Anastasia Steele and her affair with Christian Grey, a slightly older, incredibly wealthy businessman with mommy issues. Steele is a repressed virgin; Grey has a room in his house devoted to bondage and S&M play. Oh, we have to get these crazy kids together!

And together they come. Wait, that didn't...I...you see.... Moving on.

Nothing much happens during the first quarter of the book. He moves between being an jackass and a gentleman. She's conflicted about taking up with a man that she finds rude and repulsive, yet makes her, erm, loins pulse? He takes her on a helicopter ride and gets jealous over her only male friend. Her friends think he's an ass but push her towards him. Yadda, yadda.

When sex finally shows up, it's with the tittering of junior high schoolers talking about "doing it." That is, it feels disconnected from anything resembling reality. Anastasia loses her virginity (something she has held onto until her early 20s so it must have been kinda important to her, right?) to Grey, a man whose idea of foreplay is to present Anastasia with a multi-page contract outlining what she can eat and wear as well as what sexual acts will define their relationship. About that contract: despite his assertions that the rules are for both of them, it defines her role as his sexual slave (he's the dominant). By signing, she becomes a toy he can take out of its box to tie up in private and dress up for the public. While Anastasia takes a kind of lethargic offense to the idea of the contract, that doesn't stop her from spending the majority of her time outside Grey's so-called "Red Room of Pain" (it is what it sounds like) thinking about signing it just so she and Grey can be together.

Let me repeat that: this 21st century, college educated woman spends her waking moments so consumed with the idea of bagging a rich, good-looking guy that she doesn't really balk at the idea of signing a contract in which she is reduced to a commodity. A contract that would give him control because, according to him, that's the way things need to be. Add to that, it's clear early on that this guy has serious mommy issues and might even possibly be a sociopath. Not only does Anastasia not hop on the first train/plane/mule out of town, she plays the submissive at every turn, letting him be the white knight to her proverbial damsel-in-distress, while not thinking it strange that he has a way of showing up unannounced at the most opportune times. Apparently, it's not stalking if he's rich enough.

All that aside, a book like this is supposed to be all about the carnal interludes. Bad news: they aren't particularly sexy or dangerous. I won't lie, there are moments where the book felt like a honest piece of erotica and not the mad ravings of a repressed housewife, but Fifty Shades being sold as erotica is disingenuous: this book isn't about sex; it's about the idea of snagging a rich, powerful, good-looking guy who puts his woman on a pedestal. Like Stephanie Meyer--who destroyed vampire lore and feminism in her series--Jones clearly believes that all a woman really wants is a man who makes all the other ladies swoon and has a bank account big enough to make sure she's well taken care of.

Some may say books like Fifty Shades and Twilight, these forays romantic debauchery, are harmless. Are they? We now have an entire generation of teens who think that there's something romantic about what is essentially stalking and that love is defined not by compromise, but by being willing to give up everything and everyone that defines you.  Oh, and that a perfectly healthy response to being jilted by "true love" is curling into the fetal position and considering suicide. How is any of that harmless? I'm not saying there isn't room in erotic fiction for very soft books like Fifty Shades, but does it deserve to have a place at the front of the genre with millions of fans who use it to define their romantic lives? I would say no.

I've written a lot so far and haven't even touched on the writing, which is atrocious. The books began their life as self-published digital downloads and I don't think Vintage Books did much in the way of editing when they picked the series up for print. A good editor might have really made a difference here. I don't think I would've liked the story any better, but it certainly would have made the whole thing more readable. As it was, I found myself editing through James' syntax issues and poor word choices (those of you who have read it will understand when I say that I don't think she knows what the word 'murmur' means....) as I read. Plus, it's too long with rambling passages that do nothing to further the characters or the story. I think it might be possible to read just every other page and feel like you've missed nothing.

Fifty Shades of Grey is not a good book: it's overwritten and its notions about male/female dynamics are just silly. With that said, there are moments of tantalizing eroticism with a hint at their psychological underpinnings that tease at a much more interesting story; a story I kept hoping would rise above all of James' anti-feminist babble. The book ends with the possibility of Anastasia coming into her own self, her independence. I'm betting that doesn't last though--there are two more books in the series.