From an interview with Allan Gurganus about his new novel, Local Souls:
To shy away from human extremes and human sensuality makes for bone-dry fiction. A world parched of our sexual releases and our tumultuous daily emotional lives is deeply impoverished. It is not lifelike, at least life as I remember living it. Far better to, like Updike or Nabokov, have entirely too much fun with the subject than to never chance describing this replenishing source of frisky joy. … Sometimes the books most restrained about sex, even deeply scandalized by it, can whisper to us with the greatest hidden force. I am a huge admirer of the recently deceased, always underranked Evan S. Connell. His novel “Mrs. Bridge” gives us India Bridge, the country-club wife of a Kansas insurance executive. She remains a person utterly baffled by sex. Scared, she watches her three children each come of age erotically; it’s as if she sees them turn slowly into slobbering zombies. And that, for me, registers as sexy! Fear of sex is sexy. Whip me if I’m wrong. Or right.
The Dish 