Los Angeles, 1982. Eighteen-year-old Jude, newly out of reform school, is searching for her best friend, Winnie, when she falls under the spell of an older man with a motorcycle, a needle, and a taste for danger. What begins as an escape spirals into motel rooms, stickups, and drug binges. Jude eventually finds Winnie, now Velvet, dancing at a Sunset Strip club. Together they imagine a future—bartending, writing, building a life of their own—but the same world that offers glamour and freedom threatens to consume them.
Rowbottom is excellent on the power dynamics of the porn world, as well as the threats and violence men routinely visit upon women, which are portrayed throughout the novel to chilling effect ... Less effective is Rowbottom’s habit of invoking various literary antecedents, as if to position Lovers XXX within a particular aesthetic lineage ... Ultimately, Lovers XXX is about larger issues. In that, its heritage is clear. We recognize the influence of the writers it references—their milieu—without having to be told. More effective are the smaller moments, the scenes that dimensionalize on their own terms the circumstances in which the two friends find themselves.
An addictive, twist-filled story ... Lovers XXX is a reckless joyride into youthful longing and hedonism, and their bruising flipside ... Rowbottom gives her characters dignity without underplaying porn’s murkiness. She marshals the competing forces of power, desire, love and betrayal to probe the complexities of being a woman in a patriarchal world, and of society’s conflicting responses to porn itself.
Rowbottom’s sophomore outing offers a powerful, vivid, visceral look at the heyday of the adult film industry from the perspectives of the women who populated it.
