Writing about sex can be a tricky affair. The sexual act (and its corresponding emotional components) is both intimate and ridiculous, and if not approached with wit and grace, can appear absolutely ludicrous (see, for example, Paulo Coelho’s laughable Eleven Minutes).

Russell Smith understands sex, at least from the young white male perspective. The author’s previous fiction often commented on sexual mores (and his pornographic novel Diana: A Diary in the Second Person did quite a bit more); Girl Crazy puts the act and its consequences front and centre.

The novel focuses on Justin, a community college teacher who becomes obsessed with 20-year-old Jenna, whose sexual ferocity blinds him to her flightiness and legally questionable background. Justin is enthralled with her faintly dangerous lifestyle, but when the relationship ends, he continues to follow the corrupting path she set him on, and Smith’s tale morphs into a menacing and incisive search for self.

Smith excels at presenting the sexual fixations of the male psyche, slicing them apart and exposing the emotional impotence beneath. Justin, still an adolescent at heart, fetishizes each woman who crosses his path, living for “the fright of helplessness that he felt when he felt himself staring so hard at a woman who was not staring back: the feeling of seeping power … that you were the wailing infant, waiting for her to feed you.”

Of course, only half of Girl Crazy is a tale of sexual exploration; the other half is a satire of an educational system in which teachers find themselves hobbled by incompetent leadership, PR flaks, and a “stupid province-wide test designed by the kind of idiot who thinks Business English is a real subject.”

Justin’s personal transformation and some of the novel’s criminal elements lend Girl Crazy the air of a thriller à la Susanna Moore’s In the Cut. But Smith is more concerned with the psychological ramifications of hormonal obsession, and his exacting control over Justin’s odyssey from passive sexual spectator to active participant results in a story of scathing insight.