Oedipus Wrecked

by Kevin Keck

If David Sedaris were straight (or Margaret Cho were a man), they might be Kevin Keck. Keck mines the same rich vein of candid, confessional humor as these popular comics, but Oedipus Wrecked goes further in single-mindedly, hilariously recounting every grim detail of the author's almost absurdly varied sexual history. Keck pulls no punches in describing his endless, obsessive erotic experiments. In essays like "Ass Backwards," "Wet, Hot Presbyterian Summer," and "I Was a Teenage Homosexual," Keck skewers his eccentric mother (whose dildo he swipes), documents his plunge into the "chorus of coming" on a sex party line, and limns a particularly outré encounter with a girl who demands he participate in water sports but won't "have sex" because "that's a sin."

For a driven horndog like Keck, sexual taboos exist to be broken. Still he always pays a price through numbing guilt or fear of discovery — though neither prevents him from embarking on the next quest for love and orgasms. Keck's tableaux of sexual excess are rendered in vivid, unflinching language that marks the emergence of a new voice in contemporary humor that's both cuttingly comic and startlingly revelatory.