Faithful

Not-So-Erotica

Nick and Trish have great sex. They're good looking, professional Londoners and they just got married, but then, there's a lot they don't know about each other. He still calls an unrequited love, but it's no big deal; she cheats on him during a business trip, but it doesn't mean anything. Soon, she's pregnant with Nick's baby and everything seems lovely. Until, that is, Trish's ex-lover Joe comes around and convinces her that he's The One. So she leaves Nick for Joe with Nick's baby in utero and soon enough they're one strange, fragmented family: baby Charlotte, two dads who despise each other, and one modern mom. Trish, sexual deviant that she is, now cheats on Joe with Nick, prolonging and complicating his anguish. This is roughly the premise of Davitt Sigerson's debut novel, which itself reads like something of a rough sketch.

How rough? Faithful is meant to be a hot book, and the plot seems at times to exist, as in porn, merely to connect one sex scene to another. These, sadly, are for the most part short and technical: specific descriptions of sexual position, followed by predictable closures. ("They mash into each other," etc.) The rest feels like filler: We learn what pop songs the characters are listening to at every possible juncture; we get the full menu every time they sit down for a meal. (The latter being only the best, of course: These aren't poor or tasteless people we're talking about here.)

To be fair, Faithful does pose some interesting moral and erotic questions. Nobody is faithful in this story (except perhaps Nick's next girlfriend, a gorgeous, care-taking Indian woman whose name, naturally, is Sareen), but the title is not an ironic touch. As the book wears on, we watch Nick worry less about his shattered marriage and more about his vast love for his daughter, and it is the child who ultimately redeems the parents. Still, unconditional parental love is hardly a thrilling character insight. Sigerson tells his story in a clipped and arrogant present tense, jotting down his characters' emotional changes instead of writing them through. It reads like lad lit with more parental concerns (one post-coital moment is described, laughably, as "quiet time without the milk and cookies.") Ultimately, Faithful fails because the characters are mere conjectures of people, doomed to walk into the awful traps the author has set for them. It might have been a ghastly affair if it weren't so dull.

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