I have, for my sins, read all three novels in James’s Fifty Shades trilogy, a series that took sadomasochism and remarketed it for Christian housewives shopping at Target, all hot-pink padded nylon restraints and branded nipple clamps. (It’s not until page 401 of The Mister that Alessia musters the courage to look directly at Maxim’s penis, as if it’s a basilisk whose unfiltered gaze head-on will turn her to stone.) There are its gender dynamics, which assert, with the stuffiness of a 19th-century provost, that men can hump anything they please with gay abandon, while women should save themselves for their billionaire employers. There’s the simple conceit for the book: James has been compelled to write an erotic novel about a woman who’s been sex-trafficked. It’s that it’s bad in ways that seem to cause the space-time continuum itself to wobble, slightly, as the words on the page rearrange themselves into kaleidoscopic fragments of repetition and product placement. And the ultimate object of his affections, the woman who will ensure the rake’s progress from libidinous playboy to loyal husband, is … his doe-eyed undocumented Albanian maid, Alessia Demachi. In James’s new book, The Mister, the hero is an English earl who’s also a model-slash-DJ-slash-photographer-slash-composer, and whose first page of interior monologue is a vainglorious ode to “mindless sex” and a “nameless fuck.” His name, if you can stomach it, is Maxim Trevelyan. Her women are blushing, impoverished virgins, pristine of heart and fragile of appetite her men, meanwhile, are swaggering Lotharios whose wallets bulge even more conspicuously than their designer underwear. James is still out there being glowingly profiled as a transgressive, taboo-busting warrior for women’s desire, given that her fictional worlds position female characters somewhere between the saintly Dorothea Brooke and the wimple-wearing Maria von Trapp. It is strange, when you pause to think about it, that E.

El james the mister series