About a boy

In his Seven Little Stories About Sex, Eric Freeze records a boy’s sexual encounters during seven different moments over the course of his lifetime. The stories chronicle a compelling metamorphosis, from delicate and heady awakening to frustrating, familiar longing. Intimate and personal, the brief but stirring vignettes, with all of the rapid build-up and satisfaction of sexual climax themselves, seem like the sporadic entries in someone’s life-long journal—and they are certainly a testament to the power of fiction’s first-person narrative, as Freeze makes a deft transition in illustrative lens and voice by which his character recalls experience. Our narrator’s means of expression from the prepubescent perspective of playgrounds and bunk beds is vivid and fragmented, true to the sensory overload, searing images and inability to interpret situation and emotion that characterizes childhood. The young boy’s earlier memories also bring a certain sexual isolation into relief- the very private way in which one comes to understand new urges and terrifying anatomical changes. As the boy grows older, his storytelling becomes more fluid, more analytical, and his sexual experiences are less defined by internalized confrontation and discovery, and rather direct exchange with the human incarnations of desire’s impetus and fire.The boy ages and the idea of sex does too, growing out of its mystique, its dangerous and even embarrassing hold over him, until it seems an etherized means to a procreative end. While the story relates the evolution from individual awareness to a realm of shared sexual relationships, Freeze does not let us forget the enduring relationship with sex itself, the boy’s consistent bodily awareness, his sexual consciousness, in a sense.  No matter how old he gets, the narrator remains “the boy,” even as he is injecting his wife with progesterone. Freeze shows us in every story that this is the same boy who tongued the cold, plastic mouth of a stuffed bear, who learned how to pleasure himself, who kissed a girl on sacred ground. No little story about sex is irrelevant or lost, but shapes his sexual consciousness, and is crucial in telling an even larger story. What Freeze does most brilliantly is neither romanticize nor animalize sex; we are privy to the boy’s nascent primal compulsions, his irrepressible inclinations and secret, sexual development, but something else sneaks up on the reader. There all along, as true as the fearful, ugly side of desire, is an underlying pursuit of connection, acceptance, and social, interpersonal gratification. In the boy’s culminating effort to create a child, sex reveals itself as a marker of human experience. Sex, in all of its forms and roles and phases, in its ever-shifting frustration and joy and power and threatening potential, is an ever-present part of life. Freeze reveals how the memory of sexual happening is an honest record, a way in which to trace the passage of time and understand the little stories of our past- sexual and otherwise.