Pioneering 'Masters Of Sex' Brought Science To The Bedroom.

July 30, 2013

Guest: Thomas Maier

TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. The new Showtime series "Masters of Sex" that premieres in September is based on the book about sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson by my guest Thomas Maier, who is also a consultant for the series. Masters and Johnson became famous in the 1960s for their groundbreaking and controversial research into the physiology of human sexuality.

Instead of just asking people about their sex lives, Masters and Johnson actually observed volunteers engaging in self-stimulation and sexual intercourse. Changes throughout their bodies during arousal were measured with medical equipment. Until Maier's book, Masters and Johnson research techniques remained shrouded in secrecy, but he was able to uncover information through interviews with their friends, family and former colleagues, as well as extensive interviews with Johnson. She died last week at the age of 88.

Maier's book, "Masters of Sex," which was first published in 2009, has just been published in a new paperback edition. Maier is an investigative reporter for Newsday and is also the author of a book about the famous pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock. We're going to be talking about sex research and getting into birds and bees territory you may not have explained to your children. So parents, use your discretion.

Let's start with a clip from the pilot of the Showtime adaptation of "Masters of Sex" starring Michael Sheen as William Masters and Lizzy Caplan as Virginia Johnson. In this scene, Masters has asked Johnson to assist him with his research. She's been working as a secretary in his OB/GYN office, knows nothing about his sex research and is surprised to see him carrying a handful of girlie magazines.

(SOUNDBITE OF TELEVISION SHOW, "MASTERS OF SEX")

MICHAEL SHEEN: (as William Masters) I hired you because I need an assistant and because I suspect you might have a gift for the work. That said, if you're uncomfortable with what I'm doing here, speak now and I can make other arrangements.

LIZZY CAPLAN: (as Virginia Johnson) I'm not sure what it is you're doing.

SHEEN: (as Masters) I'm wiring Ms. DiMello to monitor pulse, heart rate and brain waves to illuminate to my patients and to the general community what happens to the body during sexual stimulation and orgasm. The magazines are to help with the stimulation part because, unbeknownst to me, Ms. DiMello prefers women, which to be frank concerns me because it may in fact throw off my data.

CAPLAN: (as Johnson) Why would it throw off your data? Isn't an orgasm an orgasm?

SHEEN: (as Masters) That is one of the many questions I hope to answer, but as she is my only subject, it really means I have no choice, whatever her orientation. So are you interested in the job or not?

GROSS: Thomas Maier, welcome to FRESH AIR. You describe Masters and Johnson as having medicalized sex. Would you explain what you mean?

THOMAS MAIER: Sure, before Masters and Johnson came along, the realm of sex, the subject of sex, was usually something that you talked to your priest, your rabbi or your minister, or you found yourself lying on a couch talking about your feelings about your mother to a Freudian-trained analyst. Bear in mind when they came along in the mid-'50s, it was the height of Freud's impact on America.

So they brought the realm of sex, they thought that the answers, the questions that - the questions that people were posing and the answers that people were looking for were best addressed to a doctor, who was well-trained in the subject of sex.

GROSS: And they also used medical equipment to study sex. So just tell us a little bit about the tools that they used.

MAIER: Well, Masters wanted to understand exactly how the body worked so that they could come up with therapies to fix the various different problems that married couples would have in the bedroom. So they used a variety of different instruments. One of the instruments that they used was to trace the breathing and the heart rates and such.

There was also a device that was used to internally observe sexual response by women, and that had a nickname called Ulysses, but it was something that was all part of their clinical observation of how both male and females responded during sex.

GROSS: Ulysses was basically like a large, clear, plastic tampon that was attached to a camera so that you could see and monitor what was going on internally.

MAIER: Yeah, in fact there was a fellow who was an expert at the medical school at Washington University, Kramer Lewis was his name, and he was still alive when I was doing the research for the book. And he described how it was made of Plexiglas. And it was quite a contraption, a little bit of Rube Goldberg there, but it was something that was quite effective, and eventually they would send the color photos to this lab at Kodak that basically dealt with medical schools and was accustomed to, you know, taking photographs of various different patients in the nude for a variety of different reasons. And they would get that back, and that's how they kind of traced this whole thing.

GROSS: So basically when you're talking about medicalizing sex, what you're saying, too, is they studied sex like scientists, not like psychologists. They wanted to see, like, what's happening physiologically in a woman's body, in a man's body, when they're becoming sexually aroused or when they're reaching orgasm. And had anybody done that kind of clinical approach before?

MAIER: No, it was kind of the holy grail of OB/GYNs, in a sense, that, in other words, they were all aware that there had never been a study of human beings. They had studied rabbits and they had studied apes, and in fact that's kind of how Bill Masters, studying anatomy both in Rochester and later at Johns Hopkins, became aware that this was something that had never been done.

He traveled in the circle of doctors that were looking to win the Nobel Prize for identifying estrogen and progesterone. And he felt, though, that this was, if you will, the grand prize, that this was something that would win a Nobel Prize if he could fully document over a long period of time exactly how the human body responded during the central act of procreation.

GROSS: What are some of the breakthroughs Masters and Johnson were responsible for in our understanding of human sexuality?

MAIER: Their major first book dealt with the power of female sexuality. Masters and Johnson really underlined the power of female sexuality, and in their long-term study what they showed was that women were - had the capacity for multiple orgasms in a way that men would go into what they called the refractory period after having the initial sexual orgasm.

Women were capable of multiple orgasms, and a second and a third was more intense than the first and that they didn't necessarily need to have a man to have an orgasm. And this was something that was done with about 380 women, almost an equal number of men, and they recorded something like 10,000 orgasms over a decade-long study that formulated their major book, "Human Sexual Response," that came out in 1966.

GROSS: And you also wrote that they said that women could enjoy sex long after menopause, that penis size was not related to sexual adequacy.

MAIER: Their empirical studies showed the power of female sexuality and that their studies underlined that women had a much greater capacity for sex and that this informed - it came right along with the advent of the pill, came along and kind of helped spark the feminist view about sexuality of the late '60s and the '70s. And you can see that Masters and Johnson's medical studies had a huge impact on people's understanding, the popular understanding of what was capable in the bedroom.

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Thomas Maier, and he's the author of the book "Masters of Sex" about the sex research of Masters and Johnson and about the lives of Masters and Johnson. And that book is the basis of the new Showtime series "Masters of Sex."

So it's kind of amazing to think that what they did was watch people in the act and record what was happening. He started doing this with prostitutes before he started recruiting people who worked at the university where he taught. Why did he choose prostitutes for his early research?

MAIER: Well, that was really the only female subjects that he could get to study. He was going it alone initially. And, you know, Masters had an OB/GYN practice in St. Louis, where he was in many ways like the best doctor in St. Louis. He kind of had a lot of rich clients. So he was very aware that the experiences of prostitutes were different than everyday women.

GROSS: But when he was studying prostitutes, one of his methods of observation was to go to a brothel and look through a peephole or a two-way mirror that had been designed for voyeurs at the brothel.

MAIER: Right.

GROSS: This is kind of remarkable to think of him...

MAIER: It - oh, sure is.

GROSS: Doing that as a scientist, like peering into a peephole at a brothel and taking notes.

MAIER: Yeah, it really is, and it also made me wonder how in the world did he even get the - how was he not arrested for doing this? And one of the things that I found in doing research, I found the police commissioner in St. Louis, a guy named Sam Priest - he had been the OB/GYN for Mrs. Priest when she delivered her babies.

So Sam Priest, the top cop in St. Louis, he loved Dr. Masters. He thought he was the greatest, the way that anybody who would have - that, you know, that we all kind of venerate doctors who are terrific. And so whatever Masters wanted to do in that regard, he was more than willing to accommodate.

So he had Priest, Commissioner Priest, allowed the vice squad to act as almost the accomplices with Masters in going to various different brothels in the city and observing prostitutes all in the name of science. And because Bill Masters said it, and the power of both his position, the veneration that parents had for his work as an OB/GYN, but also just the power of his personality, people trusted him. So he was even able to do something this extraordinary, all in the name of science.

GROSS: My guest is Thomas Maier, author of "Masters of Sex" about the famous sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson. More after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Thomas Maier, and he's author of the book "Masters of Sex" about the lives and the sex research of William Masters and Virginia Johnson. And Virginia Johnson just died last week at the age of 88. His book has been adapted into a Showtime series that premieres in September, which is also called "Masters of Sex."

One of the things that you say Masters learned by observing prostitutes at work was that they would sometimes fake orgasm to encourage the man to hurry up and finish. And he was just amazed. That was a huge revelation to him. And that propelled his research forward in what way?

MAIER: What happened with Masters was that he was using a number of different prostitutes, and one of the prostitutes was actually a graduate student, I believe, and he would debrief them after observing this and kind of talk about it. And he asked about orgasm, and she said, well, that she often faked orgasm. And he said what do you mean faking orgasm?

And she said are you kidding, something to the effect of buddy, you've got to be kidding. And she explained that virtually most women at some point in their life, if not almost every night, will fake orgasm, that, you know, it was a common thing. And he seemed like he was struck by lightning, that the light bulb went off on his head.

And it was this student, this graduate student, who said to him that he should get a female partner. And it was something that he really took to heart, and he realized that he was not going to go anywhere unless he had a female partner.

GROSS: And he hired a woman who became his partner in research, and that was Virginia Johnson. How did he find her?

MAIER: Well, Virginia Johnson was a 32-year-old woman, twice divorced. She was on the heels of her second divorce. She had two children, and she was going back to school, Washington University in St. Louis. She was essentially a secretary, filling out insurance forms. In fact she wasn't even in an office. She was sitting at a desk in the middle of the hallway when she started there.

She came along just as Masters was looking for a female partner. There were no, virtually no female doctors, and the few that were out there, they didn't want to go near this type of study. This was playing with dynamite. It was virtually career suicide.

He had actually broached the subject with his wife, but his wife, Libby, had had difficulty getting pregnant, and they were just having children. She didn't want to have any part of this type of study. So Virginia Johnson, this woman going back to college, looking for a degree, became eventually the ideal associate for Masters.

GROSS: And at this point Masters and Johnson started using not prostitutes but, you know, volunteers. Paid volunteers?

MAIER: Sometimes, sometimes, and sometimes just sheer volunteers. Virginia Johnson had - she was the exact opposite in many ways of Bill Masters. Masters was a hard science guy. Virginia was very good with understanding human beings, what made men and women tick, the emotional aspects of it. And that was part of her skill set that would prove to be very, very important to their work.

And one of the first things that she did was able to convince nurses and graduate students and some patients and other various different people in the St. Louis community to become volunteers in their study, essentially to drop their pants, if you will, all in the name of science.

GROSS: But was it in her nature to do the work, to, you know, recruit people to participate in their sexual studies, to make sure that they were calm and relaxed and willing and then also to observe? I mean, usually if somebody is watching somebody else perform a sexual act, it's called voyeurism, but in this sense it was called research. Did she - did you ask her about that, like how she felt when she started doing this research, watching people in the act?

MAIER: Oh sure, yeah.

GROSS: What'd she say?

MAIER: Well, she said a couple of different things. One is, she said, well, Tom, I grew up on a farm. And, you know, I'm a farm girl. So I was aware of animal husbandry, if you will. And so there was that level of clinical aspect of it. And, you know, after a while it didn't become at all difficult for her.

In fact, there was an early part in their relationship in which Masters asked Virginia whether or not this would bother her, whether or not she would be somehow upset by observing this, and she said, no, why would it? You know, there's a story that was told to me by Paul Gebhard, who was the person who ran the Kinsey Institute after Alfred Kinsey died.

And Bill Masters very much coveted the approval of Paul Gebhard. So he invited Gebhard to come and see their contraption, this Ulysses, the Plexiglas device that was able to internally be inserted and observe female orgasm. Indeed, they had a show for him, and they observed it. And Gebhard, one of the things that he pointed out, he marveled that day.

Among all the things that he marveled at, and there was plenty to marvel at, was the behavior of Virginia Johnson and the interaction with Masters because at one point this object was perhaps a little bit cold. She came in - Virginia came in with a warm compress the way in which, you know, people that go to a barber shop might get a hot towel around them.

And she put it - she wrapped it around the device to make it warm and comfy just so that it could be used by this, by the willing female graduate student, I believe it was, who displayed that - exactly what was going on that day to Gebhard. So it was those type of details that were quite impressive to me. She had a real intuitive sense of how to make things work. And for that Masters always adored her.

GROSS: One of the things that Masters and Johnson wanted to do was offer sexual therapy to couples who were having difficulty in their intimate lives. And one of the ways of doing that was to have sex surrogates. And just explain a little bit how Masters and Johnson used sex surrogates in their therapeutic work.

MAIER: Well, in their therapy, they always wanted to study how the body works so that they could fix - medicine could deal with the various different problems that couples had, individuals had, and one of the problems was impotence for men. And they found that sex surrogates could be quite effective with men who were having problems performing.

And Bill Masters had a certain utilitarian - an all-American utilitarianism to his view. If it worked, it was the job of the doctor to make it happen for the patient. And so he believed in sex surrogates. But what happened there were some legal consequences that came across there, and I think Masters and particularly Virginia but Masters became aware that he could have his medical license perhaps even taken away.

So the lawsuit was quietly taken care of by their lawyers, and they kind of vowed that they wouldn't do that, even though they said, well, you know, it did work, it worked remarkably well, but they wouldn't do it again. And I found later on that they had surreptitiously, particularly Bill Masters, had brought back a couple of different surrogates because these were people, patients, men who had profound sexual problems, and he felt it was his role as a doctor to find the cure, find the solution for them and that there was nothing wrong in doing that.

GROSS: You quote Xaviera Hollander, who wrote the bestseller "The Happy Hooker," she was a madam, and she wrote about sex surrogates. My method is basically the same principle as Masters and Johnson, only they charge thousands, and it's called therapy. I charge $50, and it's called prostitution. What do you think of what she's saying there?

MAIER: Well, I think they felt as long as it was within the realm of medicine and that people were following things here and keeping an eye on it and that it was effective for patients, that it was the appropriate course to pursue. And ultimately it was just too difficult, it was too hot to handle, frankly, politically. And that was always the problem for them, that they - the subject of sex was something that medicine, they felt, should get involved in, but medicine was not really willing to do so.

GROSS: Thomas Maier will be back in the second half of the show. His book "Masters of Sex" has just been published in a new paperback edition. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross, back with Thomas Maier, author of "Masters of Sex," about Dr. William Masters and Virginia Johnson and their groundbreaking research into human sexuality - research that remains controversial because it was based on observing volunteers engaging in self stimulation and sexual intercourse. The researchers also used medical equipment to monitor the volunteer's physiological responses during arousal. "Masters of Sex" has been adapted into a new Showtime series - of the same name - that premieres in September.

When Virginia Johnson joined William Masters as his associate, you know, her job was putting the people at ease who were participating in the subjects, in the research, preparing them, making them understand the, you know, medical and scientific importance of the work that they were doing. But she became more and more an active participant in the research. And then at some point Masters basically says to her that he and she should be engaging in sex with each other as part of their ongoing research.

MAIER: Yeah. I was really shocked by that.

GROSS: Yeah. What was the proposition that he made to her and what was her reaction?

MAIER: When they began their studies it was very much the power situation between them was that Bill was the big boss - Bill Masters - and Virginia was the secretary who was very desperate to keep the job. And so what happened was after a few months their laboratory studies was almost like that Frankenstein lab where, you know, where you see everybody's hair all jumping up out of the - there was a certain kinetic energy coming out of this lab. And what he theorized, what he said, suggested to Virginia - quite improperly - was that there would be a transference - he actually used a Freudian term - that there would be a transference if they didn't act out this sexual energy, and that the best way it could be channeled was among themselves. And it was something that I found out in my research and it was something that she kind of admitted somewhat reluctantly, was told to me by another associate initially and then she confirmed it.

And it was something that was, it underlined at the beginning of their relationship, their professional and personal relationship, was quite an uneven. He was in the power position. He was the boss, and if she didn't say yes in a sense, she would - would not only not have a job tomorrow, but that she was beginning to really love this work and that it would be over tomorrow, if she didn't agree to Bill's requirement that they have sex together. From this beginning began a very complicated relationship in which it became more and more equal, and that's probably one of the most fascinating aspects of their relationship. On this very inauspicious beginning began a much more equal relationship. And that Masters, a doctor who would probably be most, like most doctors, would be unwilling to give equal billing to a secretary, and one without a degree, that he was willing to do that is one of the most paradoxical and ironic aspects, particularly when you think about the beginning of their relationship.

GROSS: Well, also they went on to be married - although we'll talk about the marriage a little later. It didn't sound like the greatest marriage in the world. But, you know, so when he makes this proposal to Virginia Johnson, that they should be having sex with each other as part of their research, did he intend to, you know, like measure their responses and treat their sexual encounters as part of the research?

MAIER: I gathered that was part of it, you know, how things would work, but I also think it was the entree for their relationship - or at least their sexual relationship. And, you know, indeed, it became an affair, a full-fledged, very hot, hot to trot affair there over a number of years on and off. And Virginia had her own life; Bill maintained his marriage out in the suburbs, his wife and his two children. And often the way in which their average day - if you will - would work was that he was an OB/GYN by day and then after hours they would have the sex studies that would take place, and then after that they would sometimes go off and have sex themselves. And that was kind of their relationship for a number of years at the outset.

GROSS: Eventually, Masters and Johnson married. And what's your understanding of why they got married?

MAIER: Well, they got married at the very height of their fame. They were on the cover of Time magazine, and this was about 1970. And by that point, they had become quite world famous. Virginia Johnson had made more money, frankly, from, somewhat to a surprise to her, than she ever imagined, and she had met a man who had funded - a millionaire - here in New York who had provided money for their study about the impact of scent and smell on sexuality. This was a guy who provided the lemon in Lemon Pledge and all these various different scents, and he felt that, you know, somehow they found the link between scents and sexuality - that this was well worth funding. And it turned out as much as Masters liked that idea, he didn't like the idea that this fellow, Hank Walter was his name, wound up having an affair with Virginia Johnson and that eventually Virginia wanted to get married to Hank Walter. When Masters found that out, he finally decided that he was going to end his marriage, that the thing that was most important to him was not his family, was not even necessarily a relationship with Virginia, it was that work that they were doing - the brand name of Masters and Johnson. And so Masters ended his long marriage, told his kids that he was divorcing their mother, and got married to Virginia.

GROSS: My guest is Thomas Maier, author of "Masters of Sex," about the famous sex researchers, William Masters and Virginia Johnson. We'll talk more after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Thomas Maier and he's the author of the book "Masters of Sex," about the lives and the sex research of William Masters and Virginia Johnson. And that book is the basis of a new Showtime series that premieres in September.

Some of their later work was very controversial - not because of the techniques that they used but because a lot of people just thought it was out and out wrong. And one example of that is their 1979 book "Homosexuality in Perspective." What was most controversial about that book?

MAIER: Well, they had developed a therapy that was remarkably successful. They claimed an 80 percent success rate among people who would come to their clinic for two weeks and miraculously were changed, that they had whatever problems, sexual problems they had were somehow dealt with and - if you will - cured. That 1979 book dealt with the subject of homosexuality. And a lot of the book dealt with homosexuality in the same way that they had documented in their first book with heterosexuality just exactly how things worked and such. But they put - Masters insisted on pushing the envelope - if you will - by suggesting that their therapy with a handful of cases had been able to help quote-unquote convert homosexuals into heterosexuals, if the patients wanted to do this.

Now, in doing the research for this book, I came across the understanding, both from Dr. Robert Kolodny and then eventually from Virginia Johnson herself, that there was no proof of that - that that handful of cases, there weren't files on that. And that when Dr. Kolodny asked Bill Masters about it, he said, well, he insisted on it, that it happened but there was no proof. There was a lot of back-and-forth and Masters prevailed and it went into the book and it caused a great deal of mischief because it became one of the things that a number of different usually right-wing folks would say, that homosexuals could somehow convert to heterosexuality if they really wanted to, because Masters and Johnson - among others - had insisted that it would be possible if the patient really wanted to do that. And of course it caused a lot of heartbreak, a lot of difficulty for people in the years after that book appeared.

GROSS: And they also wrote in "Homosexuality in Perspective" that sexual orientation was a learned behavior. So implying that you learn to be straight or gay and implying after that that therefore you could unlearn being gay.

MAIER: Yeah. You know, I think you have to look at that book also in its time. Bear in mind, they were on "Meet the Press" for the entire half-hour or hour of that program back in 1979 and you had the leading medical writers at the time quizzing them about it, and there really wasn't much in the way at that time of people contesting some of their theories such as that, about learned behavior or whether or not it was genetic. And so they have to to some extent be viewed in the time period in which they operated.

They were still very much pioneers. Their work, particularly their early books, were so easily documented. And Masters, you know, some people have asked me whether or not he was anti-gay or such, and I, I don't think that's quite right because in the early '70s, when homosexuality - believe it or not - was taken out of the textbooks as a mental disorder, it was Bill Masters who was one of those doctors who helped push that out of the textbooks. He was one of those people that helped make the world more progressive in their understanding about homosexuality. I think it was more hubris on his part, a certain arrogance about the success rate and their willing - his fundamental nature of being a risk-taker, saying that he believed in their therapy so much that this might be possible, that they could, quote, convert homosexuals into heterosexuals if they really wanted to. And it's quite unfortunate, particularly as we look back on it.

GROSS: I'm going to ask you a question that I imagine a lot of people asked about Masters and Johnson or may be particularly Masters, who initiated the research - even when they were at the height of their fame - and that is, do you think that part of his reason for doing this sex research is that he was a bit of a voyeur?

MAIER: Maybe. If you delve deeply somewhere into his psyche, I wouldn't be able to say with certainty. I don't think so though. The way he started was as a medical student studying anatomy, and there was something even more appealing than any realm of sexual titillation; it was ambition. That's what fueled Bill Masters. He was somebody who had been, who felt, he wanted to show that he could make something of himself. He was a risk taker. And I take it was sheer ambition, raw ambition, that drove him, that was - tantalized him more than anything else here. I think that's what really was at the heart of his drive. He learned about it as an anatomy student and realized that perhaps he could win a Nobel Prize. So it was his raw ambition, I think, that drove him to do all of this.

GROSS: Well, Thomas Maier, I want to thank you so much for talking with us.

MAIER: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

GROSS: Thomas Maier's book, "Masters of Sex," has just been published in a new paperback edition. The Showtime series based on the book premieres in September. You can read an excerpt of "Masters of Sex" on our website, freshair.npr.org.

TERRY GROSS, HOST: July is just about over, but if you're still looking for that ideal novel to read on your vacation, our book critic, Maureen Corrigan, has two recommendations that she says are midsummer dreams.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN, BYLINE: The novel I've been recommending this summer to anyone - female or male -who is looking for the trifecta - a good story that's beautifully written with a tone that's hilarious and humane - is Maggie Shipstead's debut novel of last summer called "Seating Arrangements." I was about to go all old school and excitedly add that "Seating Arrangements" is now out in paperback, except since more and more readers are instantly downloading new books at a discount, paperbacks are becoming increasingly irrelevant.

The main character in "Seating Arrangements" is concerned that he and his pedigreed kind are becoming irrelevant too. Winn Van Meter is a WASP. He approves of discretion, shorts with little whales on them, and Bloody Marys - lots and lots of Bloodies, as they're called.

"Seating Arrangements" takes place on a Nantucket-like island where the Van Meter family is hosting a wedding for their daughter Daphne, who is hugely pregnant. This is the 21st century, after all. When the father of the bride shambles around in a polite funk because he's been quietly shunned by the island's exclusive golf club and because his house has been invaded by the bridal party, who deposit make-up and bikini tops everywhere. One of the more flirtatious bridesmaids is making Wynn cranky in a sexual way. She has a name that only a fellow WASP could find arousing. She's called Agatha.

Author Maggie Shipstead mocks the pretentions of this tightly enclosed world, even as she thoroughly and compassionately inhabits it. She's Edith Wharton with a millennial generation edge. And while the society of "Seating Arrangements" may be select, Shipstead's range as a writer is democratic. She roams from a slapstick subplot starring an escaped lobster, to sublime reflections on marriage and death.

Here's Wynn's sister-in-law meditating on the middle-aged consolations of her current relationship with a live-in lover named Cooper: quiet dinners out, long weeks apart when he was off sailing, compatible taste in TV and movies, mutual tolerance of each other's friends, agreement that they would never marry. Even if things fell apart, she would draft another companion from the bush leagues of washed-up lovers, and they would wait out the violet hour together.

I honestly may reread "Seating Arrangements" this summer to savor Shipstead's droll language anew. "Seating Arrangements" won the L.A. Times Book Prize for Best First Fiction, and the good news is Shipstead has a second novel coming out in 2014. I confess, when I first saw the title "Seating Arrangements," I assumed it was a chick lit bauble.

The title of Jessica Lott's debut novel doesn't serve it well, either. It's called "The Rest of Us." But if Lott's title is unmemorable, her opening chapter is etched in acid. Terry is a photographer's assistant in her late 30s who's been stranded for years in that no-man's land between college and the next stage of adult life.

When she was a college undergrad, Terry had an affair with a famous visiting poet named Rudolf Rhinehart, and he remains the love of her life. On the very first page of "The Rest of Us," Terry has just stumbled upon Rhinehart's New York Times obituary. By the way, in that imagined obituary, Lott demonstrates a wicked gift for mimicking the meaningless pronouncements of hoity-toity culture criticism.

The obit reads, in part: A profile on Mr. Rhinehart for the New York Times magazine in 1999 attributed the bestseller status of his acclaimed poetry collection "Midnight Spring" to its finding portals of transcendence in the unceasing repetition of our daily lives. That's just the beginning of the fun, because on page seven of the first chapter, a depressed Terry is wandering around Bloomingdale's when she spots none other than Rhinehart standing in front of the Estee Lauder counter, buying a gift for his wife.

It turns out the obit in the Times was a mistake. It also turns out that Rhinehart's current marriage is something of a mistake, too. In the character of Terry, Lott nails that sense of being stalled, of being an adjunct in life, when everybody else seems to be a fully inducted player. "The Rest of Us" itself stalls a bit towards the end, although Lott executes some unexpected riffs on the student-professor relationship plot.

Both Shipstead and Lott, first-time novelists though they may be, have arrived.

GROSS: Maureen Corrigan teaches literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed "Seating Arrangements" by Maggie Shipstead and "The Rest of Us" by Jessica Lott. You can read an excerpt of each book on our website, freshair.npr.org. Coming up, jazz critic Kevin Whitehead reviews a new album by clarinetist Darryl Harper, who chairs the music department at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. This is FRESH AIR.

TERRY GROSS, HOST: Our jazz critic Kevin Whitehead has a review of a new album by jazz clarinetist Darryl Harper, who comes from Philadelphia, has toured and recorded with violinist Regina Carter, and chairs the music department at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. Kevin says Harper's music is imbued with the blues.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC, "SPINDLESHANKS")

KEVIN WHITEHEAD, BYLINE: "Spindleshanks," a little out-of-sync boogie-woogie for Darryl Harper's clarinet and Kevin Harris' piano. It's from Harper's "The Edenfred Files." In jazz, the clarinet went into eclipse for awhile, drowned out by louder trumpets and saxes.

The instrument has long since made a comeback, and the modern clarinet thrives in settings where it doesn't have to shout to be heard. In his spare trio Darryl Harper uses on most of his new album, he can sing softly as an owl in the night.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

WHITEHEAD: Darryl Harper and his simpatico colleagues from the long-running Onus Trio. They cherish that great renewable resource, the blues, rooted in 19th-century field hollers: music of the cleared woodlands. Harper's woody clarinet timbre makes the connection.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

WHITEHEAD: The trio also play Julius Hemphill's "Kansas City Line," a modernized blues that's 10 bars long instead of the usual 12. It seems to end in midair. When they play the melody twice, the beginning of the second time through sounds like the real ending. The musicians add to the playful ambiguities by messing with the tempo here and there.

(SOUNDBITE OF JAZZ MUSIC, "KANSAS CITY LINE")

WHITEHEAD: Darryl Harper likes his blues with a twist, some way of tweaking its form or rhythm or feel. The blues isn't all he plays, but on his "Edenfred Files," it's rarely far away. On bassist Matthew Parrish's "Sirens Calling," a spiky melody and rhythm have the easy flow of an intricate folk dance. Drummer Butch Reed makes it roll.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC, "SIRENS CALLING")

WHITEHEAD: The album "The Edenfred Files" is modest in a good way: a short program for two small combinations, ending with a solo piano Coltrane ballad that's somehow a fitting close to a clarinet recital. It's a musical chapbook, or novella. The scale suits Darryl Harper's pointedly focused music. Sometimes, a small helping hits the spot better than a jumbo platter.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

GROSS: Kevin Whitehead writes for Point of Departure, DownBeat and eMusic, and is the author of "Why Jazz?" He reviewed "The Edenfred Files" by clarinetist Darryl Harper. You can download podcasts of our show on our website, freshair.npr.org, and you can follow us on Twitter @nprfreshair and on Tumblr at nprfreshair.tumblr.com.

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