Natural Loving — Richard Carter

A seriously comic account of the consequences we humans face when we take it for granted that, because love in any of its forms -- including love of money, etc. -- is “natural”, it needs neither shaping nor definition. It centers on a love affair between an economist, Claudia, and a poet, Stafford, an affair which is nearly derailed by Claudia's liason with a neurologist-sexologist who knows nothing of the necessity for budgeting pleasure. The novel concerns the success or failure of its characters to shape, and so place limits on, their passions and desires. Its principal characters include a rogue financier, an economist, a Catholic priest, a political scientist, a scholarly Rabbi, a poet and a Caribbean Island Weed-woman. In short, the novel is about human nature and human bodies, and the need to shape our body's demands and needs for satisfaction. NATURAL LOVING is a different kind of novel. For one, my characters are presented as acting primarily on what they think, rather than as more or less blindly reacting to social pressures, personal history, or the demands of their blood chemistry. Also, novels since Rousseau tend to presuppose that we only require a minimum of institutional pressure to shape us into dutiful Consumers; humans' folly in his picture, is defined as anything which disturbs the chain of supply and demand.