When the sixties ceased swinging, the sexual revolution diversified and penetrated new markets, like actual property. Adults-only condominium complexes sprang up in reply to the wants of the misplaced and lonely, the childless and sexy, providing experiences each socially stimulating and aquatically immersive. Such is the promise of Villa Dionysus, a membership for swingles ages twenty-five to forty, and the setting of Maiden, Cynthia Buchanan’s debut from 1972, her first—and thus far solely—novel, each deb ball and swan music.
Initially printed by William Morrow, the guide was nicely reviewed, and the movie rights promptly offered; there have been rumblings of a Robert Altman film, a Lily Tomlin car. For years, the author and director Jane Wagner aimed to adapt it, however a tv particular referred to as “Picket Nickels” by no means escaped manufacturing purgatory. Now the novel returns to us courtesy of Hagfish, a reissue press named after the bottom-dwelling, goo-producing creature, and whose transient is deep-sea dredging for forgotten work. However Maiden is much from goo, and is, in actual fact, very, superb. It’s the story of Fortune Dundy, a thirty-year-old virgin who has landed in Los Angeles searching for love and success. Lured by a brochure, she joins the Villa Dionysus occasion, the place the membrane between paradise and perdition is skinny.
Fortune is a soft-boiled detective on the hunt for somebody particular. “She was searching for a person,” Buchanan writes of the virgin’s quest. “She certain was searching for some man.” The sleuths of noirs self-narrativize, however as an alternative of a tape recorder or voiceover, Fortune favors an uncommon system: an imaginary emcee. For this position, she casts Bert Parks, the longtime and real-life host of the Miss America telecast, who made a profession of moderating recreation exhibits with names starting from the titillating (Masquerade Get together) to the pragmatic (Steadiness Your Funds). “There she is,” Bert used to sing to Miss America. In Maiden, he’s Fortune’s crooning interlocutor and chief confidant. In her thoughts she talks to Bert and Bert talks again. “You recognize, you seem like one million {dollars} in mauve!” the imaginary Bert says at one level. At one other, Fortune responds, “In case you are mendacity to me, Bert, I’ll kill you.”
“I consider tv goes to be the check of the fashionable world,” wrote E. B. White in 1938, one that might inaugurate both “a brand new and insufferable disturbance of the overall peace or a saving radiance within the sky.” Maiden is a novel concerning the guarantees and corruptions of that check, a peace disturbed as Fortune waits with bated breath for her savior—no angel or god, however a person who would step from the game-show stage, throw a leg by way of the little display, and enter her lounge: the lover ex machina.
Maiden options intercourse and success, in addition to the shortage thereof. The sexless Fortune finds a roommate in Beverly “Biscuit” Besqueth, a baby-talking divorcée who appears intent on reclaiming her personal maidenhood by behaving as a toddler (she calls her mutton-chopped boyfriend “daddy” and calls for that he ravage her lips until they bleed). Biscuit’s ex-husband, the dentist Skip Fritchey, rents an workplace within the Villa Dionysus advanced and looms giant for Biscuit and Fortune: the previous despises him; the latter longs for the eligible DDS.
However Fortune doesn’t actually wish to have intercourse—not bodily. Sexual mishaps by the hands of cartoony, brutish males happen within the novel’s antic mode of comedy. Fortune begins relationship Phil, an oaf greatest described as “unsummoned.” His head is a humorous form, his breath is rancid, and when he dry humps Fortune on the seaside, he reaches a unilateral climax: “I simply made a multitude in my—oh, Gawd, I really like you!” he cries out. Male our bodies are significantly repellent. When the dentist pulls up his shirt to point out off his barbecue-fork scar, she notes his “tender, invertebrate” flesh. She entertains a quick, Cronenbergian worry of the wound reopening, which doubles as a terror at her personal intercourse. “Throbbing meat!” she thinks. When a gust lifts the leg of Skip’s swim trunks, her ardour wilts on the sight of his uncovered white thigh.
A send-up of relationship, the novel additionally satirizes one other American ritual of humiliation: the job hunt. Across the advanced, the strapping bachelors who had been as soon as stuntmen now work for the Freeway Division. Fortune, who scoffs on the prospect of changing into a salesman, turns into a salesman. The job market is a spot the place one will be violated and despoiled. Views of the working world are extremely sexualized however distinctly unsexy. Campbell, Biscuit’s boyfriend, an advert man engaged on the “Pudding Tain” marketing campaign, produces a Roman-themed industrial on the VD, shouting at his fashions “to admire the pudding, ogle it, for the digital camera.” When Fortune will get a job demonstrating cake ornament, she squirts frosting with aplomb: “You simply slip your nozzle onto your material frosting gun right here, squeeze like this right here, mild, mild with the palm of the hand…”
A lurid world of innuendo and mishap displays and echoes Fortune’s discomfort with bodily intimacy. Of her many suffered indignities, essentially the most excruciating is perhaps when Fortune, who learns to like her demo cake job, quits in protest of the hairnet mandate. (“I occur to be a person,” she quips, “whose hair is her glory.”) However lacking the work, she cuts her locks and tries to return—solely to search out that the demo-deco outfit has moved south for the season. Jobless and shorn, she strikes on to the following degrading gig.
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Like pizza, goes an inane saying, even dangerous intercourse is fairly good. Not true of comedian prose, although it helps when the satirist writes in addition to Buchanan. On the Could Day Seaside Bash, for instance, Fortune runs into Skip by the restrooms. Rattled by the encounter and awed by the lavatory signal denoting his area, her thoughts roams to male areas she’s by no means had the privilege of exploring—the john, for one, however the physique too:
MEN stated the signal. Via these portals cross MEN. MEN for you, and MEN for me. MEN for right this moment and MEN for tomorrow. Proper up that avenue, round that nook, by way of that door marked MEN. MEN with penises like cartoons, jutting out like frankfurters, drooping and complicated genitalia that seemed like newly hatched squabs. MEN with penises, MEN with guarantees.
Fizzy and jagged, tart and parodic, Buchanan will be many writers directly. “Language, like intercourse, reminds us we’re alive,” she as soon as wrote. “Language haunted her,” she writes of Fortune, nevertheless it’s Buchanan who appears possessed. She will be slapstick and flashy, grim and austere, earnest and melancholy. She lights up prosaic chapters with formal aptitude, detonating textual content with white house and phrases in shapes. Maiden’s plot is overly affected person, almost dormant, till it bursts like a punctured artery.
Originally of the guide, Fortune appears semi-fastened to sanity, although the reader is alerted to her quirks and blossoming insanity: she is an anxious daydreamer, an extravagant dresser, a little bit of a voyeur. She stalks Skip, who’s puzzled and amused by her weirdness. By guide’s finish, the pins in her hinges are lengthy gone. There’s one thing of Travis Bickle to her—the chaotic sexual naïveté, the siloed lifetime of a wanderer and not using a previous, the dream of salvation—and like Bickle’s story, the ultimate minute of Fortune’s will get blitzed within the broiler of taking place. If intercourse can’t be had, then violence is the obtainable consummation.
On a weekend journey up the coast, Skip and Fortune share a mattress; she wakes early, slips exterior, and from the quilt of the backyard watches him sleep. Mirrored within the window, Fortune can watch herself watch the dentist. In The Tradition of Narcissism, the historian Christopher Lasch wrote that to the narcissist, every thing is a mirror; to Fortune, her consciousness mediated by tv, every thing is a display. Buchanan drills right into a second depth of narcissism past the pleasure of reflection: the joys of watching the watcher, who’s oneself. Fortune watches Skip sleep with all of the rapture of tuning into her favourite present. Slightly than reside her dream, she’d somewhat see it play out on the tube.
Maiden captures the lengths and anguish of self-presentation: “She made a fetish of herself,” Buchanan writes of Fortune. Fortune stuffs her bra with tissue, wears a corn-colored hairpiece “brighter than doll’s hair,” decorates herself in feathers, Frenchifies her title with an additional letter and diacritic (“Fortunée, rhymes with have-your-say.”) In her invented tête-à-têtes with Bert, her promoter and prosecutor, Fortune is contestant and defendant—however she can be Bert, the imaginary man who sprinkles his approval upon the try-hard younger women. She is such a man-made creature, the reader begins to suspect her ruses are actual.
Fortune “had no thought how false she was,” Buchanan writes of her first protagonist. Within the author’s fingers, the contrivances should not causes for ridicule however proof of an individual—the inside and outer structure of a self. In a weird and charming op-ed for the New York Occasions printed the identical yr as Maiden’s launch, Buchanan delivers a cryptic salvo in protection of artifice, a précis for her novel. “To marry our true selves, we should forgive our false ones,” she writes, “even reward our folly. For nothing is extra earnest, extra actual than falseness, nothing extra human.”
Walker Rutter-Bowman is a author and the buying editor of Dalkey Archive Press. His work has appeared in Triple Cover, The Nation, and The Baffler. His debut play, The City, was staged at Vino Theater in Could 2026 and at Spectacle Theater in July 2026.
