The Woman in the Fifth
by Douglas Kennedy (Hutchinson, £12.99)

Consider the curious case of an American penis in Paris. Having caused a ruckus back home in Ohio, the penis flees the country only to find itself consigned to a hotel vase, as its hapless owner relates: “I picked up the vase, pulled out the flowers, tossed them on the floor, pulled down my boxer shorts, placed my penis inside the vase, and let go. The relief was enormous.”

The narrator’s relief in having detached himself from the troublemaking member is understandable, but the reader is left hanging for another 100 pages, wondering as to the fate of the unfortunate penis, left to languish in a vase after its owner leaves the hotel and embarks on adventures of his own. Has it been thrown out with the trash? Taken home as a memento by a chambermaid?

Finally, the penis and its owner are reunited in the presence of the novel’s eponymous femme fatale. The penis, showing no resentment at its long abandonment, becomes hard. How hard? “So hard it strained against the zip of my pants.” We are later to learn, moreover, that the penis has special powers of breaking down female moderation: “Once I was inside her, she became immoderate”. And so, with little fanfare, the rupture between the hero and his penis is forgiven and forgotten. Yet, as one mystery is solved, another is just beginning.

Who, after all, is “the woman in the fifth”, whom the hero meets on a dark balcony at a salon? We settle gently into automatic writing: Margit, a Hungarian beauty, has a voice that is “low, slightly husky”. At first, our hero can see only “the outline of her body and the glow of her cigarette”, but then she “moved out of the shadows”, and “the moonlight brought her into focus”, as it has the habit of doing. Margit has “thick chestnut-brown hair that was well-cut” and she is “slender to her waist”; she is in her 50s, “still handsome”. Her perfume, naturally, is “the musky scent she wore”, and have we already mentioned “her low husky voice”? No matter: it is surely worth typing out again. For their first assignation, Margit is “dressed in a simple black turtleneck that hugged her frame tightly and accented the fullness of her breasts”. That about covers it.

Meanwhile the hero and his penis have other concerns. He is a film lecturer named Harry Ricks, fled to Paris after a scandal. (His teenage daughter helpfully sends him an expository email early on, letting us know that he had shagged a student.) With not much money, he winds up renting a filthy bedsit from an evil Turk, and sharing a toilet with the big, fat, disgusting Turk next door. (Though near penury, Harry also goes to the cinema three times a day, which by my rough calculation would be costing him more than his rent, but you can’t put a price on art.)

He also takes a job as a night watchman for a dodgy Turkish enterprise run down a dark alley, and catches chlamydia after his penis inserts itself into a Turkish waitress. Rest assured that there are also some nice Turks, although they disappear; and then the bad ones start dying. So Harry comes to the attention of the police, including Inspector Clouseau — sorry, Coutard — who announces: “All criminal action is fundamentally gray. Because everyone has a shadow . . . and everyone is haunted.” Quite so.

What are the Turks of Paris really doing, apart from “talking conspiratorially” over their tea? What is the nature of the business for which Harry works, sitting in a room with a CCTV monitor every night while writing an interminable novel? And what does this all have to do with the husky-voiced, musky-scented, full-breasted Woman? Reader, you would not believe me if I told you, and I did not believe it as I was reading. Still, the author is a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, which must count for something. And any novel that contains the deathless line “Fuck your Scotch. Are you dead?” cannot be all bad.

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