SOURCE: "Eros Redux," in The New Yorker, Vol. LXIX, No. 44, December 27, 1993–January 3, 1994, pp. 154-59.

Merkin is an American novelist and editor. In the essay below, in which she offers a laudatory assessment of Simple Passion, Merkin addresses the popularity of the volume in France, discussing its status and uniqueness as an example of erotic literature.

The possibility that we are all fated to inhabit sexual islands of our own idiosyncratic making was brought home to me at a small dinner party I attended several months ago, when the hostess mentioned that two once prominent couples—no longer together, owing to death in one case and divorce in the other—had enjoyed sex lives that were notably "kinky." Of course, I understood the term, in some purely literal sense, as I assume did the other guests—but then my imagination wandered off, in directions peculiar to my history, and...