“I had a hard-on so big I thought it would pick me up and throw me out the window.”
–From Going Away, by Clancy Sigal.
This from Going Away, Clancy Sigal’s superb but mostly forgotten memoir/novel about a disenchanted fellow traveler zooming across America in a convertible red DeSoto (from Hollywood where he has worked as an agent), meeting fellow disaffected Commies en route: a sentence that does for male tumescence roughly what “In the fall the war was always there but we did not go to it any more” does for armed combat: the sort of sentence that picks up this writer and makes him want to cheer.
Peter Selgin is the author of Life Goes to the Movies (Dzanc, 2009).