" Sex, " Michel Foucault famously declared, " is boring. " The author of Histoire de la sexualité must not have been trying the kind of stuff Robert Coover writes about. In Lucky Pierre (Grove), an orgiastic romp exploding with endlessly adventuresome suckings and fuckings and reamings and creamings, Coover concocts a wordy world of boisterous bonking that makes Tropic of Cancer read like The Book of Mormon.

A renowned postmodernist and professor of electronic and experimental writing at Brown University, Coover spent more than three decades stroking this tumescent prolix fuck fest, a mammoth picaresque that tips its jimmy hat to Jimmy Joyce, Williams Burroughs and Gibson, and Philip K. Dick (hey!) as it wends its wobbly way through an uproariously smutty demi-monde to an ejaculatory climax. But is it shooting blanks?

Lucky Pierre (called L.P. by his adoring public), is a porn-star proletarian, an erotic everyman. " It is understood that this is who he is, what he does, what he must do, " Coover writes; " it is his karma. He is a man who fucks. " Gamely scampering through a procession of skin flicks (or is it just one big one?), his rock-hard prick standing ever at attention, L.P. plies his trade in the permafrozen night air of Cinecity, a ghastly decaying megalopolis where " thousands of shuffling feet trample sullenly through the blood, slush, and snow, cars spin and smash into one another, things topple — wastebins, traffic signs, lampposts, marquees — as though obeying some inner mechanism of despair, entropy’s special effects. "

The story, such as it is, follows L.P. as he lives his life held captive by celluloid, ever in thrall to nine muses cum directors cum stars (each of whose name is a c-word) who subject him to page after page of their copulatory caprices. Under Cecilia’s watchful eye, L.P. is the helpless sadist in a silent movie who turns a young girl’s " delicious expanse of snow-white bottom . . . into ribbons of wealed flesh and blood. " In Cleo’s film, his head is swallowed whole by her vagina, which he describes as " a warm pot of honey. " In Clara’s directorial star turn, L.P. receives his Cunt of the Month ($500, COD), and after he’s disastrously misassembled Catherine, she " pokes it in her armpit " while he sucks on her nippled crotch.

Coover is a ceaselessly inventive stylist who, it’s clear, thrills at the chance to play fast and loose with vivid, scarifying depictions of a gallimaufry of fetishes and perversions. He writes in quickening gusts that evoke the inexorable surge toward orgasm, spews ecstatic exclamation points, screams in all-caps. He loves the page, and he treats it as a heaving and undulating canvas.

Which is interesting given that at Brown he teaches a class where students compose stories entirely on the screen, where the magic of hypertext allows for a protean story line that exists in three dimensions. In 1992, long before many had even seen the Internet, he penned a New York Times Book Review article called " The End of Books " that augured the obsolescence of the printed page. That hasn’t happened yet, but Coover strives here to evoke the malleability of hypertext fiction: L.P. is entrapped in a whir of motion, unremittingly zoomed forward and dropped through and held fast in a chilly continuum that’s beyond his control.

But despite his travels, he doesn’t actually go anywhere. And on balance — despite its author’s linguistic trickery and his hilarious, jaw-dropping prurience — neither does Lucky Pierre. After a while Coover’s gaudy garrulity starts to feel onanistic. His ostensible goal is to explore and poke fun at the way we’re imprisoned by our desires, at how our sexual urges shape and mold our identities. But for all the yuks to be had as hapless L.P. is dragooned into films like Law and Ordure: A Cocks and Rubbers Masterpiece or compelled to learn his " reaming, writhing and rhythmic dick, " Coover’s incessant cleverness obscures any substantive exploration of sexuality and media. After 300 pages or so, his licentious logorrhea suggests a drunken, sensationless fuck where, after long, fruitless thrusting, both parties finally give up, sweat-drenched, and roll over in exhaustion.

No question, the world Coover has wrought is stupendous and stupefying — a perpetual whir of screams and grunts and positions that would make the authors of the Kama Sutra blush. But though he’s created a detailed, dazzlingly cinematic world that heaves with carnality incarnate, he doesn’t quite nail it when it comes to infusing this fantastic sound and fury with a human resonance. As one of his own muses says: " pure artifice, I don’t care how clever it is, lacks real bite, that push-pull thing that grips us all. "