“If you hurl an uprooted penis into the air, it will not come back to you,” she writes, invoking the boomerang as an anatomical model. So “Bonk” uneasily mixes revulsion with “those rare, shining moments when urology approaches high comedy.” Roach are nothing if not memorable, but her book consistently undermines its own discoveries. The penile mishaps (one involving a bristled toothbrush), severings (one involves hungry ducks) and surgeries cited by Ms. Certainly that formula works for circus sideshows, with which “Bonk” has too many interests in common. But a comparably unhealthy curiosity ought to be prompted by some of the bizarre anatomical minutiae that is cataloged here.
Granted, morbidity was a basic part of those books’ reporting.
Roach did with her earlier books about the dead and the supernatural. It’s odd that “Bonk” arouses less morbid interest than Ms. “I do so hope they wore lab glasses,” she writes about the sex researchers who conducted that particular investigation. Roach to describe, say, the spurting of vaginal fluids in a tone of clinical interest, then shrug off the subject with a wisecrack. Sounding like a sicko is important to “Bonk.” Sounding like a coy, winsome sicko is even more so. When she jokingly envisions a moment of voyeurism “because that’s the kind of sicko I am,” she is not really describing her own proclivities. Roach is measuring her own genitalia for one doctor’s study (“It is interesting,” he writes to her, “that you could reach this stage of life and not really have any call to know how the parts line up”) or interviewing skilled Danish pig inseminators, she continues to ask herself whether she’s making her readers queasy. Roach writes in the introductory chapter that she calls “Foreplay.” No wonder: the cringe factor is everywhere. “I’ve been tripping over the cringe factor all year,” Ms. In order to give “Bonk” a first-person chumminess, the writer moonlights as her own favorite guinea pig. This time erotica is also a factor, since Ms.
It means that the author of “Stiff” and “Spook” has plastered another snappy, one-word title onto another of her fluffy, facile and by now formulaic surveys of science-related exotica. Readers of Mary Roach’s first two books know what “Bonk” means.
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