What hubby misses

What is it about explicit sex? A writer only has to hint at it and she's being hailed as an instant "publishing sensation". So it is with Nikki Gemmell, or "Anonymous" as she prefers to be known on the title page of her new novel, The Bride Stripped Bare. There's quite a bit of explicit sex in Gemmell's overwrought tale of a housewife's erotic adventures.

Here, in a nutshell, is the plot. A successful university prof marries Mr Nice and they jet off on honeymoon to steamy Morocco. At 36, our heroine is in possession of all the customary middle-class neuroses about her career, her thighs and whether she should spit or swallow. Plus one extra. Our prof has yet to experience an orgasm and Mr Nice isn't about to give her one. This couple's sex life is as dull as ditchwater and a good deal less dirty.

She is repressed beyond the bounds of probability and he would rather watch TV. Not even her best friend, an apparently successful sex therapist, seems to be able to offer a solution.

This being fiction, a solution does arrive, courtesy of a Central Casting Latin lover. Before you can say Galician gonads, c-words are leaping off the page and our heroine is making up for all those lost orgasms. But why stop at the Latin lover?

A couple of taxi drivers and one random slapper later, it begins to dawn on our girl that all this liberated sex does nothing to satisfy the "real" woman within.

In what has become conventional post-feminist chic-lit wisdom, our heroine's sexual awakening leads her to the overwhelming conclusion that male and female genital bits are one thing (well, at least two things) and great sex is all very well, but the only true and lasting satisfaction is to be had in good, old-fashioned, motherhood.

The Bride Stripped Bare is written in the second person, a notoriously difficult perspective for a writer to pull off, and here it sounds strained, its authority undermined by Gemmell's pointless first-person framer about a woman whose daughter disappears, leaving the novel which follows on her laptop.

The sex in this book is surprisingly well-written, given how hard it is to write good sex (let alone, according to Gemmell, to have it). Gemmell is refreshingly straightforward about the act. No blooming buds or silly, stiffening serpents. But it's hard to see how it justifies an anonymous nom de plume. Henry Miller, Anais Nin, Georges Bataille, Irvine Welsh, Jean Genet, Ian McEwan and so on, have all written about sex more riskily and explicitly.

As for the rest, Gemmell comes over like Colette on a bad day. The weather is "unclenching", time is "God-tossed" and the "valley of need is within you".

In one paragraph our heroine's husband, Cole, is a wet fish and "if you put your hand on his groin in bed he'll shrug it away", and in the very next "you love the ferocity in his need". Does Mr Nice suffer from a split sexual personality?