"Fiedler... would have been delighted by the ability of some of our best writers to dance knowingly around the volcano..."

"... the 'chuckles and whispers and much munching about the neck and shoulders' in Lorrie Moore’s 'Anagrams,' for example, or the 'tumblings and flexings and shudders' in John Barth’s 'The End of the Road,' or the 'stiffened giblets' in Tom Wolfe’s 'Hooking Up,' or the 'freaky rubs and naughty pinches' in Chuck Berry’s extraordinary autobiography."

Writes Dwight Garner, in "A Field Guide to the Dark, Sexy Swamp of American Literature With its bracing studies of fiction’s secrets, this 66-year-old work of literary criticism still surprises and delights" (NYT). The reissued book is "Love and Death in the American Novel" by Leslie A. Fiedler.

It's hard to write about sex! Apparently, the word "and" is helpful. Only the Tom Wolfe quote lacks an "and."

"Stiffened giblets." Wow, that's so offputting. Let's see, I've got "Hooking Up" here on Kindle. 

Ha ha, I've got the passage highlighted:

If anything, “sexual revolution” was rather a prim term for the lurid carnival actually taking place in the mightiest country on earth in the year 2000. Every magazine stand was a riot of bare flesh, rouged areolae, moistened crevices, and stiffened giblets: boys with girls, girls with girls, boys with boys, bare-breasted female bodybuilders, so-called boys with breasts, riding backseat behind steroid-gorged bodybuilding bikers, naked except for cache-sexes and Panzer helmets, on huge chromed Honda or Harley-Davidson motorcycles. 

That's on page 5. Replete with "and." You need these pairs and lists for sex.

I see Wolfe uses "stiffened giblets" again — with 2 "ands" — on page 142:

Up until 1985 pornographic movie theaters were as ubiquitous as the 7-Eleven, including outdoor drive-ins with screens six, seven, eight stories high, the better to beam all the moistened folds and glistening nodes and stiffened giblets to a panting American countryside. In 1985 the pornographic theater began to be replaced by the pornographic videocassette, which could be brought into any home. Up on the shelf in the den, next to the World Book Encyclopedia and the Modern Library Classics, one now finds the cassettes: Sally’s Alley; Young and Hung; Yo! Rambette!; Latin Teacher: She Sucks, She Has Sucked, She Will Have Sucked. 

Ah! Tom Wolfe! I miss him. But what I want to know is how did Chuck Berry get on Garner's list of "some of our best writers"? Well, here's Garner's 2017 review of Berry's 1987 book: "Chuck Berry’s Memoir Grabs You Like a Song."

One of the things that made Mr. Berry’s songs jump out of the radio was his mischievous feel for words and his knack for alighting on details so fresh that they squeak. “They finished off an apartment with a two-room Roebuck sale,” he sang about the newlyweds in “You Never Can Tell.” “The Coolerator was crammed with TV dinners and ginger ale.”

This same instinctive feel for language flows into the autobiography. You’re not far into it before he describes a friend who is “as ugly as death eating a dirty doughnut.” A few pages before that, a girl is so pretty that the author “would have daily taken out her garbage just to be near her can.”

His sentences pop, as if he had a Coolerator crammed with them. He writes about the world like a man noticing everything for the first time....

Yeah, why didn't he win the Nobel Prize?

Here's my tribute to "the Coolerator was crammed with TV dinners and ginger ale" from last May.