Susan Sontag concludes her essay, “Against Interpretation,” with an admonition to critics: “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.” I thought of Sontag’s essay while reading Tim Ward’s wonderful new novel, Arousing the Goddess – an account of the narrator’s affair, while travelling in India, with an Austrian graduate art student named Sabina – and not just because of the inadequacy of a critical propensity for intellectualized interpretation as a response to a work that is often emphatically sexual. The central tension in this book is between hermeneutics and erotics, “an attempt to unite the opposite poles of… cravings for sex and God.”

In two previous works, What the Buddha Never Taught (1990), an account of a stay at a Theravadan Buddhist monastery in Thailand, and The Great Dragon’s Fleas (1993), dealing with further travels in Asia, Ward has proved an intelligent, humorous, and unfailingly curious guide, with a keen eye for detail and a poet’s love of words used precisely. He is a man in quest of the absolute, and a formidable interlocutor in the philosophical and religious discussions that dominate these works.

Arousing the Goddess is both anatomy and confession, like its predecessors, but it is also a love story, with the necessary components of frustrated desire, heartbreak, and fantastic sex. First and foremost, however, it is a romance, in its flirtation with allegory, its ascetic hero’s quest to reconcile the conflicting demands of flesh and spirit, and especially in the wild and dream-like energy that enters its protagonists’ lovemaking, and is theophanized in the goddess Kali.

The narrator enters what he identifies as a Tantric state during sex with Sabina, one in which both partners experience orgasm without either genital contact or ejaculation. This experience leads him to research Tantric sexual practices in an attempt to understand what he calls “sex without desire.” Although this description might incline us to agree with Ward’s observation that he “can’t crawl into bed with a woman without bringing Jesus and Buddha and all the archangels,” his speculations on the subject are fascinating.

Ward is particularly honest and courageous in his treatment of sex. Although it deals with the metaphysical, the book concludes with a refreshing attachment to the mystery of the visible. It contains a great deal of food for thought in a spiritually anorexic time, and it is beautifully written.