Chastened: No More Sex In The City, by Hepzibah Anderson

Thus far, Hepzibah Anderson’s journalistic credentials have been impeccable. Graduating from Cambridge with a degree in English Literature, she was fiction editor of the Daily Mail until 2007, and wrote on debut fiction for The Observer for five years. She is now freelance. A quick internet sweep reveals articles she has written about Edmund White, Toni Morrison, and Alice Munro. She’s a brainy writer, who turns out top-drawer copy on exciting new books. Which is why it is so disappointing that her first published work is Chastened: No More Sex in The City (Chatto & Windus).

The book recounts Anderson’s experiences over the course of a year where she abstains from penetrative sex. Why? Well, for a number of reasons; disappointing ex-partners, frustration with the ubiquity of sex in popular culture, and a vague feeling that intercourse has become somehow impersonal in the noughties. All of which provide valid impetus for abstaining from the beast with two backs for a sustained period of time. No doubt the experience gave Anderson myriad insights into her troubled psyche, and a renewed enthusiasm for life, love and relationships. Why she had to inflict this half-baked slice of self-help fromage on us is quite another matter.

Disappointingly for a literary critic of such distinction, Anderson’s prose style is clichéd, and the insights it offers workaday at best. Consider the following: ‘It's only when you've sworn off sex you begin to notice that it is everywhere. It's in the swing of a waiter's hips, the tilt of a head, the gaze you know you shouldn't hold.’ But the waiter’s hips are weighed down, buckling beneath the thousand schoolgirl diaries that have recorded them; his gaze is cross-eyed, having gazed so many times before in pulpy airport paperbacks. And the revelation? That sex is everywhere? Come Hepzibah, allow us to introduce ourselves to you: we are the human race.

As there is very little to say about not doing anything for a year, inevitably the author starts skirting around the periphery of her subject in search of something to fill up the word count. Annoyingly, for Anderson, this is the outfits. Early on she is ‘shopping for a new chaste wardrobe.’ Later, she informs us that she is ‘wearing a blouse, its buttons done up all the way to the top, and a modest vest beneath.’ Her latest non-date (yes, she allows herself to date, to ‘test my vow in order to prove its existence’ and presumably to inject some sort of momentum into the limp narrative) N, ‘the rock star’, tells her that she looks a little ‘buttoned up.’ Thus clothes become a metonym for the soul. How devastatingly original.

This may seem unfair, and there will be those who applaud this book for its brave stance against the bushfire of sexualisation that is burning around us, at least in the Western world, but it is the lack of rigour with which Anderson treats her subject, and the lack of insight she derives from it, which ultimately disappoints. Chaste is a trivial book written in a trivial style by an intelligent woman who should have delivered something better for her debut. And that is a pity.