"Come on, vriendje . . . podelnaakt like me;" "poking with his index the ronding of his jeans klep;" "his lizardy stipe of a penis." These phrases - part of a literary Babel that includes Danish, Dutch, Latin, Greek, and the kind of seedful English more often found in Mrs. Byrne's Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure, and Preposterous Words or the Jabberwocky's weskit - are from the writings of Guy Davenport. They run through the stories like veins of spalting through planed maple. These, and other imports and etymologies like them, are meant to capture phases of nakedness, friendship, the body's directly sexual parts and, most persistently of all, the bud moment of sexual awakening. Even when their meaning is opaque, their sound foreign and slightly ominous in the ear, they have in common the copper-penny ring of precisely the right word, the most worldly experiences offered up in terms of unworldly precision.

Thought and dialogue in the stories are different and the same, sibling forms evolved from the same forces: returning to his school dorm from a visit wherein most friends wore only sweaters with nothing below the waist, two boys walk "back to the dorm, talking about Aramaic phrasing discernible in New Testament Greek."[1] Latin names are given for trees, obscure politicians and writers plumbed, geological eras slivered off by strata and fossil record, history mined: "The word cell in biology comes from Robert Hooke whose microscope showed him that nature in fine was a honeycomb."[2] Erudition of many fields is thick on the ground in Davenport.

But there is no denying that it is the descriptions of sex play, most often between adolescent and even younger Scandinavian boys, that strike readers with the most force, that lodge in us as riddles of discomfort. Masturbation rules, most often solo, but at times in my-hand-on-your-hand-on-mine friendship. But it's "don't worry, be happy" sex, giddy even. "Twice, said Anders, and got pulled off twice in the dingle, by untuckering boy power, a tongue in overdrive, and an everloving will," is a description of sex that doesn't take itself too seriously, offers no purchase to trauma. And as engaged as the stories are with their thesaurus of handjobs, of addictive self-satisfying sex, the addicts rarely move on to the harder stuff: as befits an idyllic sex world, we are not surprised that regret, jealousy and violence are rare in Davenport's work; but the fetish of masturbation also means that fellatio is uncommon and sodomy an sich vanishingly rare. (As rare as death-by-consequence - for which, see "The Bicycle Rider," where a drop-out, who chooses to live in a world he sees as a grimy blur, immune to any attempts at enlisting him in ideas of clarity, "as unresponsive as God," as the narrator declares[3] dies of a cocaine overdose.) So, while the boy sex here may be precise, it is not of this world with its grubby, internet-cruising pedophiles.[4]

Still, we readers look into Davenport's character's world from our grubby own, and getting enjoyment from reading passages about underage boys masturbating makes us uncomfortable - with ourselves. But no need to worry; what we are reacting to, the fetish we are responding to, is another level down: Davenport's works allow us to indulge our fetish for balance and clarity, for precision. This is an excerpt from the story "The Bicycle Rider":

        …splitternøgen and as healthy as a horse, heel of right thumb along shaft of distended penis,
        ball of thumb on glans, finger curled underneath and partly around, face faunish, nose pert,         eyebrows arched, feathery eyelashes lowered in gaze at penis, at least 18 cm, foreskin rolled
        back of glans in a fat wet crumpled ruck, the thick stalk ridged with callopy wales branched over
        by a relief of veins, glans in snubby profile glossy with a slick of bulbourethral drool. . . . [5]

There is no denying the fact that a quickening, a rising of physical and intellectual responses comes of reading such descriptions - comes even to those of us in no way attracted to young boys, or their lizardy stipes. Some of the directly sensuous response we feel rides in on that old poets' stand-by, orotund sound, but there's more: the harmonies between human nature and the surroundings, for one. Davenport's narrative structures characteristically move from descriptions of the one nature to the other with ease, and without need of explanation. But a more persistent lure is the words' precision. "Vagueness has vernacular charm," Davenport says in another context, but vagueness rarely has the power to arouse the kind of response we think of as that which rises to the lure of a true fetish. Any description can tell us what we are meant to think of, but the more precise the description the more present that which is being described.