Neurotica

The psychosexual dramas that have become Beach s oeuvre are the subject of her first book-length publication, Neurotica. This short story cycle is a provocative collection of explicit stories chronicling the narrators intimate journey from sensual awakening to spiritual transcendence. I wanted to capture the reality of my own spiritual travels through a fictionalized accounting of the sexcapades I have both lived and imagined.

Elva Maxine Beach - Author

Here’s a taste of Maxine’s book:

A Quote From the Story ‘Can I Get a Hallelujah?’

A strange sensation surged throughout my body. My impulse to pee vanished. My awareness that I was sitting between Mom and Pop in the middle of Sunday evening service vanished. I heard nothing, felt nothing, knew nothing except for this one moment. My entire body convulsed. And then, I was back, I was shivering, awake, aware. Confused. Satisfied. Happy. Anointed.

What People Are Saying About ‘NEUROTICA’

In one of his last documented interviews, Jacque Derrida ponders the nature of love. In doing so, he asks: do we love someone? Or do we love something about someone? This “who” or “what” question suggests the possibility that when one falls in love, it could be the love of some criteria, some set of standards that the beloved expresses— the “what” of love. Alternately, love could be directed at the unique singularity of the person—the “who” of love.

Elva Maxine Beach’s Neurotica sits in space between these possibilities. Its unnamed narrator is in many respects a cultural tourist, perhaps even fetishist, seeking lovers from backgrounds alien to her own. The Indian, Islander, Boxer, and a host of other lovers populate the work, and each serves to reveal habits and obsessions, fears and lusts, longing and loneliness of novel’s central persona.

In terms of narration, episodic construction of work is at once fragmented and unified, reminiscent of the work of Kathy Acker, but often with greater heart and humanity than Acker often reveals to us. Neurotica’s prose chapters are interspersed with poetic selections, which inform or complicate the psychological rendering of its central voice. For example we learn of our narrator’s soil-hewn origins in the opening selection “I am from bluegrass,/ from hillbillies, ignorance,/ and hard work,” and images from our speaker’s past continue as refrains throughout the work. As the work proceeds, a mosaic of erotic encounters (some pastoral, some violent and unsettling) add up to an engaging portrayal of a woman who connects many versions of herself as potential mother, daughter, wife, opportunist or victim.

Concentrating only (not merely) on sex in the novel would miss its significance as a fresh contemplation on aging, loss and the complex contours of gender. The work asks us to consider the impossibility of merging two separate beings through love, but suggests that ceasing the search would be ceasing to be human.

Todd Rohman, Assistant Professor, English - St. Louis Community College

Beach has written a book that will have readers wanting to take their clothes off one minute, squirming with discomfort the next, then being struck by the sadness of humanity. Then wanting to strip again. She covers the many shades of sex, not just the obvious.

Teresa Bergen, author of “Killing the President”

Neurotica delivers the uneasy kick of a one night stand or the off-balance excitement of an amateur porno, yet Beach’s descriptive passages radiate such warmth and detail that they seem to cry out in the vernacular of one’s own memory. The humanity of this writing eats most writers for breakfast and compares Beach favorably to Bukowski and Anais Nin.

Rex Rose, author of “Toast”

In the imaginary erotic trilogy of Anais Nins’ Delta of Venus and Diane di Prima’s Autobiography of a Beatnik, Neurotica is the shuddering climax. This writer-protagonist, however, is not just some plastic humper boning for another gasm-flash, she is damn real, with a history and experience all readers can identify with such that, beneath all the throbbing fantasies and sucking pumping flesh-sessions pounding out the rhythm of this book, we become pulsing body parts in a masterful portrait of ourselves secreting terrible twisted truths in Ecstasy! Extreme, serious, humorous, fucked up and off the hook!

Mark Spitzer, author of “Riding the Unit” and “Chum”

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