Allie Rowbottom’s second novel, Lovers XXX, begins with a disappearance. Or, better yet, a pair of them. First, there is Jude, “eighteen, only just,” arriving in Los Angeles after a stint in reform school. Then, there is Jude’s best friend, Winnie, who ran away from their hometown of Newhall, in the Santa Clarita Valley, at age 16, after the death of her mother left her at the mercy of a “stepfather, Mitch, who was, simply put, a predator and a pervert.” The year is 1982, and Winnie has found a job dancing at a strip club called Ladies of the Valley.
It’s not long before Jude is also working there, and both girls have branched out into porn.
The early 1980s, of course, was a period of sea change in the so-called adult industry, not least because of the shift from film to video production. As Rowbottom explains, “Film: thirty-five millimeter, the purview of real artistes, an art form that, like porn itself, had once been confined to theaters and now, unlike porn, had been made obsolete by video. Video: shot in half the time, for half the production cost, and sold for eighty bucks a pop to rental stores and men who ferreted the tapes home, plugged them into VCRs in the dead of night and watched in private.”
I don’t know about “real artistes,” but the rest is wholly on the mark. Pornography, after all, has long done a dance with technology. There are daguerreotypes staged and shot in the mid-19th century—the dawn of the photographic era—that rival anything on the internet for graphic content. And let’s not forget the internet itself. Electronic media, Rowbottom reflects late in the novel, “had come to supplant video, to wrench from performers any kind of meaningful money. Soon the supplanter would be virtual reality; already you couldn’t swing a dick online without running into articles about the dangers of sex bots, destined to cuck us all.”
Lovers XXX takes place within the context of that history. Constructed in two parts, one from the point of view of Jude and the other from that of Winnie, the book stretches more than 30 years, from the Reagan era to 2015. This is one of its most surprising and effective elements. Rowbottom’s decision to eschew a smooth transition in favor of a sharper temporal juxtaposition—Jude’s section ends in 1984, while Winnie’s unfolds entirely during the latter period—renders it more of one. “She was fifty-one now,” Rowbottom observes of the second character; “her face had started its slow inward turning, caverns under her cheekbones and at her temples, the same she remembered on her dying mother almost forty years before.”
What such a passage seeks to interrogate is beauty, which deepens, as opposed to dissolving, with age. In that sense, it recalls the author’s 2022 debut, Aesthetica. Yet even more important is the perspective that necessarily attends the process, a subtle reordering of time. Winnie represents a case in point: bowed but not broken, exactly, by her past. “She had called herself an old soul once,” Rowbottom writes, “and it had felt true, a way to gesture at her trauma without having to name it.” That there’s a “but” implicit in the open ending of that sentence is entirely the point. Trauma, Lovers XXX means to tell us, is inevitable. It is what we do with—or about—it that resonates. This is the case, as well, for Jude, whose trauma includes a junkie boyfriend, Laird, who initiates her into both heroin and armed robbery, and the loss of Winnie, with whom she is in love. “Get it into your head,” Winnie insists as their friendship breaks apart beneath the weight of everything. “I don’t love you like you love me.” The line will reverberate throughout the narrative.
Rowbottom is excellent on the power dynamics of the porn world, as well as the threats and violence men routinely visit upon women, which are portrayed throughout the novel to chilling effect. “Now,” she reflects, describing Winnie’s midlife, in a condo near Solstice Canyon, “some parts of Malibu were patrolled by private security vehicles. But not this part, and even in 2015 it wasn’t unheard of, that fateful turn of the doorknob. So long as there were men, it would never be unheard of.” Indeed, a central turning point revolves around one such act of devastation, although it would be revealing too much were I to divulge more.
Less effective is Rowbottom’s habit of invoking various literary antecedents, as if to position Lovers XXX within a particular aesthetic lineage. The passage quoted above, about the “fateful turn of the doorknob,” grows out of a riff on the essay “The White Album,” in which, as Rowbottom synopsizes, Joan Didion recalls “keeping a running list of license plate numbers, odd men who came to her door seeking a telephone, or selling something fake, men whose information she logged on a pad of paper stored in a dressing table drawer, where the police would find it when the time came.”
The problem isn’t that the summary is inaccurate, although Didion’s dread, I’d argue, was more broadly focused, having to do most essentially with her own inner weather and the particular perils of the time. Rather, it is unnecessary. So, too, are references to Eve Babitz—there is more than one—or to Denis Johnson’s novel Angels, which, in actuality, was a year away from publication when Jude sees it in Winnie’s hand. Yes, it’s true that each of them expresses the desire to be a writer. (For Winnie, writing will become both her salvation and a kind of curse.) But this also feels like a narrative imposition, especially during the first part of the novel, when they are consumed, in more ways than one, by the demands of the industry.
Ultimately, Lovers XXX is about larger issues. In that, its heritage is clear. We recognize the influence of the writers it references—their milieu—without having to be told. More effective are the smaller moments, the scenes that dimensionalize on their own terms the circumstances in which the two friends find themselves. A man on a plane hits on Winnie. “Please,” she tells him. “Give me a break.” Jude is forced to make a crushing calculation: “She had been elbowed into porn by debts owed to men and had done the math of many women before her, weighing costs, benefits, compliance, capiche.” In moments such as these, the novel’s density accumulates. The weight, the desperation, the need to carve out a place apart. It is here that Lovers XXX finds its own space, a liminal territory between past and present, between whom the characters wished to be and whom they have had to battle to become.•
