Robert Silverberg's Connie

Connie is one of the sleaze novels that science fiction grandmaster Robert Silverberg wrote in the late 50s and early 60s. This one was written under the pseudonym Loren Beauchamp and published in 1959.

Connie Barrett is an ordinary teenaged girl living in Brooklyn. She lives in what used to be a nice neighbourhood but now it’s not quite so nice.

Connie has her future all mapped out. She has a really nice boyfriend named John. They’re going steady. Eventually they will get engaged. Then will come college. And, in the fullness of time, marriage. She has already decided that they will have three children. Connie figures they’ll be able to get married in about four years time. In the meantime Connie intends to hang on to her virginity. She’s sure that John won’t mind waiting for four years to have sex with her. If he really loves her he won’t mind at all. John is at college now but Connie is confident he won’t be going out with any other girls. Why would he need when he only has four years to wait?

Then one night Connie heads off to post a letter. And gets gang-raped on her way home.

That changes everything. All that trouble she want to to preserve her virginity now seems to have been rather silly.

Connie knows that from now on she will be That Unfortunate Girl and everybody will feel sorry for her. She doesn’t like that idea.

She gets packed off to her grandparents’ home in Arizona to rest and recover. She does a lot of thinking. Marriage to John now seems like an unreal prospect. And in fact a few days later she gets a letter from him. John now thinks that maybe they should stop going steady for a while. And maybe marriage isn’t such a great idea. Connie sends him a reply, telling him that he can do whatever he likes. She doesn’t care any more.

Connie is going to have to make a new life for herself. She wants to make that new life as far away as possible from everybody she knows. San Francisco sounds interesting.

She will have to find a job, but Connie has that all figured out. Connie likes to have her future mapped out. She will spend five or six years as a high-class call-girl, then retire and maybe become a rich man’s mistress.

She doesn’t mind the idea of being a call-girl. After all, it’s too late now to worry about her virginity. And Connie has discovered that she rather enjoys sex.

Connie is very successful as a prostitute but then she makes a mistake. She falls in love.

This is a book that deals with what were hot-button issues at the time, and are still hot-button issues today. The subject of prostitution upsets people just as much today as it did in 1959. Especially if the author decides to write about a prostitute who is actually a very sympathetic character.

The core of the book is not the rape, but the responses of various characters to it. John’s reaction, deciding he no longer wants to marry Connie, would probably have been common enough in an era obsessed with puritanism. Her parents’ response, their total inability to deal with the situation, would probably have also been common.

What’s more interesting is Connie’s response. She decides that everything in her life is now changed, but she is determined to create a new life for herself. She is adamant that that means starting afresh in a new city. Connie is a practical girl. She has absolutely no desire to be poor. Becoming a call-girl seems to her to be an entirely rational sensible decision. Looking at things in a totally hard-headed way it has to be admitted that her decision makes sense. It makes sense if you can cope with it emotionally, and Connie is confident that she can. And she does. It’s not her career as a prostitute that brings her life to a new crisis.

This is typical of sleaze novels of the era. There’s lots of sex, but none of it is even the slightest bit graphic. The sleaze factor (which was of course the selling point for these books) comes from the sexual situations rather than explicit textbook descriptions of sexual acts. The most shocking element in this novel would have been the sadomasochistic episodes (which still shock some people today).

Silverberg varied his approach to sleaze fiction somewhat. Sometimes his endings were upbeat, sometimes downbeat. Some were harder-edged than others. Some of his novels were sleazier than others, and some were more romantic.

These sleaze novels were in many cases essentially sexy romances. They dealt with love as well as sex. And this book certainly has some romance angles.

Like all Silverberg’s sleaze fiction Connie is well-written (Silverberg had mastered the art of writing very quickly but still writing well) and entertaining. Recommended.