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Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timberd.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today, I'm very pleased to have us my guest, Ricky DuCourney.

She has been my guest before, and now her new novel. This has been a Wade. I think it's her first in five years. And it's called what I'm going to say as Netsuke. It's a Japanese word. How do the Japanese say it, Ricky? Netske. And what is it?

So it's a small wood or ivory or jade carving that's used on a cord around the waist.

Men used to wear it around their kimono to haul down the tobacco pouch, the tobacco and whatever materials

they needed to smoke. And it's often erotic. It's often very, very beautifully made and strange.

Many of the figures are complex and somehow uncanny. One of my favorites is called the wasp

carver, and I mention it in the book, and the wasp carver

is a wasp that's been eating away at the fruit of a plum or a peach or something and

kind of boring its way into the flesh of the fruit, and it's disquieting and also somehow very

sensuous. The disquieting and also somehow very sensuous.

The disquietingly sensuous is the subject frequently of the work of my guest, Ricky Ducernay, and Netske, Netsuki, is no exception.

These figures, though, seem to be the product of art and extraordinary compression,

which is natural, it seems, in this book, because this book is the narration by and large

of a psychoanalyst who is like a wasp who's been boring into the fruit of the most sensuous kind,

...