Ian McEwan's now-no-longer-quite-new book, On Chesil Beach, is, it turns out, is an entire short novel, in the classic English pastoral literary mode, about a wedding night premature ejaculation.
All else in the story – her patrician upbringing in Oxford and driven study of classical music, his disadvantaged youth and tragically brain-damaged mother, their class-crossed courtship on the tennis courts and in punts on the river – all of it is in service to the premature ejaculation scene.
That scene, however, it must be admitted, does comprise the most compelling, starkly well-written, and utterly unforgettable (not in a good way) premature ejaculation, if not in all of literature, then certainly in this reviewer's experience:
In horror she let go, as Edward, rising up with a bewildered look, his muscular back arching in spasms, emptied himself over her in gouts, in vigorous but diminishing quantities, filling her navel, coating her belly, thighs, and even a portion of her chin and kneecap in tepid, viscous fluid. It was a calamity, and she knew immediately that it was all her fault, that she was inept, ignorant, and stupid. She should not have interfered, she should never have believed the manual. If his jugular had burst, it could not have been more terrible…
…now she was incapable of repressing her primal disgust, her visceral horror at being doused in fluid, in slime from another body. In seconds it had turned icy on her skin in the sea breeze, and yet, just as she knew it would, it seemed to scald her. Nothing in her nature could have held back her instant cry of revulsion. The feel of it crawling across her skin in thick rivulets, its alien milkiness, its intimate starchy odour, which dragged with it the stench of a shameful secret locked in musty confinement – she could not help herself, she had to be rid of it. As Edward shrank before her, she turned and scrambled to her knees, snatched a pillow from under the bedspread and wiped herself frantically…
She snatched her shoes from the floor and ran through the sitting room, past the ruin of their meal, and out in the corridor, down the stairs, out through the main entrance, round the side of the hotel and across the mossy lawn. And even when she reached the beach at last, she did not stop running.
