Grownup Show and Tell

By R.Z. Sheppard

TITLE: MAKING LOVE

AUTHOR: RICHARD RHODES

PUBLISHER: SIMON & SCHUSTER; 175 PAGES; $18

THE BOTTOM LINE: Here's more about a sex life than you may want to know, but that won't stop you from reading on.

RICHARD RHODES HAS WRITTEN about the unspeakable and the unthinkable. His first book, The Ungodly, was an epic treatment of the Donner party, those galloping gourmets who survived the Rocky Mountain winter of 1847 by eating their dead. The Making of the Atomic Bomb traced the thin line between creative genius and mindless annihilation.

Rhodes now takes on what many readers will consider the untouchable: a no- holds-barred account of his sex life from earliest masturbations to strenuous exertions in pursuit of his fantasy, "a young woman drunk with sensation, overstimulated, perpetually orgasmic."

His frankness is both liberating and embarrassing -- some readers will be embarrassed for, as well as by, the author. He relives adolescent homosexual encounters, initial heterosexual experiences, marriage-bed routines, and affairs with women coyly designated Y, O, P, W, K and G. There are visits to sex clinics to observe procedures for extending orgasms, a precise description of the author's penis and details of a hydraulic feat Henry Miller would probably have thought too incredible even for fiction.

"All that can be thought can be written," says Rhodes, quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson. Fair enough, but writing explicitly about sex requires a more delicate touch. It takes only a few pages to realize he is in the grip of graphomania. Flesh must become word. His style swings from confessional to clinical, from pop psych to steamy paperback prose: "Her body fired explosively, every muscle contracting, and her back arched grand mal off the bed from the abutments of her feet and her shoulders." A passage comparing his own orgasm to a thermonuclear explosion may start a chain reaction of giggles.

Making Love is best read after Rhodes' A Hole in the World, a memoir of his mother's suicide, his stepmother's abuse and his father's weakness. The boy's loveless childhood now becomes the man's sexual void, an emptiness that can never be filled.

Eventually Rhodes concludes more is not necessarily better. He confesses to having used women as sexual sounding boards and professes a midlife conversion to sensitivity. Not all women will be convinced, especially when he boasts that "having a penis is like owning a cat. What a comedy and what a gift." Men should find this celebration of the antic phallus cheering but may not be glad Rhodes has let the cat out of the bag.