Sir Ian Dunham interviews the novelist Allan Gurganus about his new book, “Local Souls.”

Dunham: Your just-published collection of novellas, “Local Souls,” has been compared to John Cheever’s randiest suburbia, to Humbert Humbert’s bedtime stories for an underage “Lolita,” and to Grace Metalious’s 1956 popular novel of village erotics, “Peyton Place.” In a review in the Times, Dwight Garner gave the book a sort of G.P. kiddie-warning label because of the amount and type of sex you put in it. How does the paper of record’s concern about your fiction’s erotic undercurrent make you feel, sir?

Gurganus: Hornier.

I’m flattered that the Times can still be scandalized by my figments’ orgasmic necessities. After the criticism, my publisher noted a direct surge in sales. Money is so freely discussed today, maybe sex is shock value’s last frontier? The U.S. outlawed the import of Joyce’s 1922 “Ulysses.” An act of masturbation kept that book offshore. Joyce defended his characters’ right to have at least one daily erotic experience, even if self-induced. My genius teacher Grace Paley used to say, “Fictional characters also deserve the open destiny of life.” This, for me, includes the red-blooded possibility of having, say, bi-weekly sex, either in or out of marriage. Tell me the truth. In fiction and in life, is that asking too much?

Dunham: Your book, like others characterized as being salacious, actually seems focussed elsewhere. Yours is about the balm and limits of community or about the varieties of love. De Sade’s output is, surprisingly, as much about numerology as whip-craft. When it comes to making something erotic happen on the page, whom do you go to?

Gurganus: When I grew up, there were locked cabinets in public libraries. You needed parental permission if you were under eighteen. I was let down by the overblown reputations of some hardcore fictional works. D. H. Lawrence’s notorious “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” contains so much bedside talk about farming methods and class warfare that somebody retitled it “Lady Loverly’s Chatter.” I admit to recalling how the gamekeeper named his own male member “John Thomas.” As usual, with so many others John Thomases, it soon controlled, then upstaged, its owner.

Nabokov is and was a sort of god. His erotic fascinations all seem to involve incest. This speaks to me as a family-loving man. Nabokov’s gift for rendering both textures and smells makes even his descriptions of tree bark sexy. I would like to thank Dwight Garner for comparing my smut to “bedside stories told by Humbert Humbert.” I hope to see that in a future ad. I love “Lolita” for its aching sense of loss, there right from the very beginning. How sad to be fixated only on eleven-year-old girls. Love’s ephemerality is played as allegory here. The chances of a great love’s ever happening are miniscule at best. But decades of difference in the lovers’ ages makes that even rarer. At the end of this great work, we encounter Lolita as an overworked, married mother wearing bad glasses and a housedress; she looks like every dreary former lover we encounter years later. We marvel at how powerful (if brief) our spell of madness was for this particular person. Nabokov’s language turns the universe into expert oral foreplay. That he can also write so wisely about much other than sex seems almost unfair.

Sometimes the books most restrained about sex, even deeply scandalized by it, can whisper to us with the greatest hidden force. I am a huge admirer of the recently deceased, always underranked Evan S. Connell. His novel “Mrs. Bridge” gives us India Bridge, the country-club wife of a Kansas insurance executive. She remains a person utterly baffled by sex. Scared, she watches her three children each come of age erotically; it’s as if she sees them turn slowly into slobbering zombies. And that, for me, registers as sexy! Fear of sex is sexy. Whip me if I’m wrong. Or right. Connell based this character on his own mother. He loves the woman so much that he defends even her sweet cluelessness. I will admit I find that Mrs. Bridge herself carries a true erotic jolt for me. But, then, I adored my own late mother. She was a great beauty—to her sons, at least—becoming the subject of many billable therapeutic hours.

Updike’s “Couples” set itself the dank task of describing, at ob-gyn closeup range, the back-seat and woodshed actions of every adulterer in one very itchy little town. His excess zeal at detailing each wet texture, every scent, strangely dates this novel. Updike never stopped being an A+ Harvard undergrad, writing “themes” daily. Sex was sorely explored. But you can so assert your knowledge of free love, nobody actually believes you. Updike’s drive to overcome his puritanism is puritanism. What does grow sexy and fascinating is how hard he worked to turn the reader on. It’s like he got a writing M.F.A. from the Masters and Johnson institute. Here is a fellow in his study, exercising a satyr’s drives through an angel’s vocabulary. He is typing with one hand, hoping to turn himself on with a language he clearly found sinful and therefore far sexier.

My own favorite kind of boyhood porn was the written kind. It was that long ago. I could not afford high-priced dirty pictures. So, like any suburban son of college grads, I settled in a locked room with an antique book that at least looked library-worthy. “Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure” (1794) can still float the modernist boat. Especially the scene where a mentally-impeded messenger boy (the eighteenth-century equivalent of the sexy U.P.S. guy in shorts) wanders into a whorehouse to bring some letter and goes from room to room delivering far more.

Dunham: Well. You grew up in a generation at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where writing about sex seemed all but mandatory. It was not even an elective.

Gurganus: Yes, 1972-74. You could not tell a story chronologically, and if you did not have varieties of genital and oral ramrod sex in any given story you were considered both repressed and backward-looking. Sex between fictive married people did not quite count. I mean married to each other. My Workshop contemporaries included such direct wizards at sexual writing as Denis Johnson, Stuart Dybek, T. C. Boyle, Jane Smiley, Richard Bausch, and Ron Hansen. We attended various farmhouse orgies. And, like straight-A Updike, we sat in the car afterward taking notes. It all seemed a part of the daily grad-student grind. Our teachers, after all, were Cheever, John Irving, Stanley Elkin—all artists ever ready for another healthy dare.

It was a different age. Looking back, there seems something healthy and Whitmanesque about both our appetites and the sure sense that they all belonged stuck to the page. Whitman claims, “We are utterly lost without the sexual texture of things.” I think that internal rhyme between “sexual” and “texture” is very conscious and kinda hot. Gag me if I’m wrong.

Dunham: Very well. I feel you’ve bragged long enough about how you spent the seventies in the American Middle West. What about writing students today? I think you recently taught at Iowa and at Texas’s Michener Center.