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After I had agreed to review this book, it sat unopened on my desk for several months while I tried to work up the courage to read it. People who came into my office would see it lying there, its glossy black cover broken by a gaping, wound-like patch of red displaying the title in ragged black letters, and invariably they would ask me, "Why are you reading that?" In all those months, nobody ever said to me, "Hey, that sounds like a really great read" or "I, too, am deeply interested in the subject of torture; could you lend me the book when you're done?" Instead, one person after another reacted to the mere presence of such a book exactly as I did: with revulsion and avoidance.

In fact, Intimate Violence: Reading Rape and Torture in Twentieth-Century Fiction takes as its central subject precisely the kind of readerly resistance that the book itself evokes. Without ever being so facile as to assume (as, for instance, many commentators on W. B. Yeats's poem "Leda and the Swan" have done) that representations of violence can be reduced to mere metaphors for reading and writing, Laura Tanner explores the ways in which fictional accounts of rape and torture enact their own kind of "intimate violence" upon us, their unwilling, brutalized readers. The strategies of resistance that Tanner offers us are diverse and challenging if often extremely subtle. Ultimately, Tanner suggests, our only weapon against violence of the body is the power of the mind, and engagement with the scourge of physical violence begins with the empowering act of critical reading: "Seeing into violence ... becomes a form of resistance when what is exposed before the eyes of the reader/viewer is not his or her own helplessness but the dynamics of violation; the critical reader in the scene of violence uncovers not just the vulnerability of the victim or the observer but the very power dynamics upon which the violator's force depends. The power of the reader to resist ... the 'force' of the text often parallels, in the representation of intimate violence, the power of the reader to resist complicity -- either through passive viewing or unconscious participation in the act of violence represented therein" (15-16).

In the course of demonstrating such strategies of readerly resistance, Tanner takes us on an intimate tour of a wide range of twentieth century texts that depict acts of physical violence: the rape scenes in William Faulkner's Sanctuary and Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place; the contrasting depictions of torture in George Orwell's 1984 and two recent Amnesty International television commercials; the interplay of symbolic and literal violence in D. M. Thomas's The White Hotel; the commodification of sexuality and violence in Hubert Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn; the psychotic brutality of Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho; and the imbrications of race and gender in the rape and murder scenes depicted in Louise Erdrich's Tracks. Tanner focuses in minute detail on the most graphic and disturbing portrayals of violence in each of these works, deftly marshalling reader-response, semiotic, and materialist theoretical models in a series of intricate readings that succeed above all due to her considerable skills at close textual analysis. "The process of finding one's self in a scene of fictional violence," Tanner argues, "is the first step toward choosing a location rather than being located" (16). Tanner's own choice of critical location is a courageous one, and her readers cannot help but benefit from the clear-sightedness and sensitivity with which she approaches such a fraught and difficult subject.

Like any critical study, of course, Tanner's book contains its share of limitations and omissions. In a work that draws so heavily upon Marxist and materialist social critique, for instance, one misses any sense of historical and cultural specificity; Tanner's emphasis on readers precludes her asking pertinent questions about the aesthetic agendas, social backgrounds, historical situations, and national identities of the writers she discusses, so that not only rape and torture themselves but also the writers' strategies of representation come to seem like timeless acts rather than the socially contingent entities that they are. Moreover, although the cover blurb promises to arm us with a theory of reading "that emphasizes the reader's status as negotiator between the conventions of representation and the material dynamics of violence," the book's own negotiation between representation and reality takes place, necessarily, within the realm of the purely semiotic, so that it remains unclear how any mode of readerly resistance, however compelling, could affect or change the material world in which women and men really are raped and tortured daily. "My study of reading," Tanner notes, "represents a move toward empowering myself and other readers with the ability to resist the pull of violation, if only in representational terms" (ix). That "if only" is crucial; intellectual analysis of representations of violence is not the same thing -- however much one might wish it could be -- as countering violence itself.

Paradoxically, in fact, Intimate Violence, even while empowering the reader of violent fiction, increases one's sense of impotence in the face of real-life violence, for it points to and even deepens the very gap between substance and symbol that it aims, in Tanner's words, to "negotiate." How, then, is the enlightened, empowered reader supposed to respond to the violence enacted not only in but also by this book? What strategies of readerly resistance can and should we undertake? Reading Intimate Violence, with its focus on the most grisly scenes in each of the fictional texts it discusses, is an even more wrenching experience than reading almost any of those texts individually. Indeed, the cumulative effect of the book is one not of empowerment but of despair, as violence comes to seem ever more universal, ever more omnipresent, even while remaining depressingly variable in form, degree, and representation.