Confession time: once upon a time, as a starving grad student, I was a phone ‘ho. Or, as I put on my taxes that year, “fantasy consultant.” So I was immediately interested when I heard the premise of M.J. Rose’s Lip Service – a writer undertakes phone sex for research purposes and ends up on a voyage of self-discovery. Would the sex be portrayed as I remembered it? Would the book be any good? Or erotic?

The answers are sort of, eh, and occasionally.

First of all, let’s get the rest of the plot out of the way. Given the hype on the book, you would expect most of its pages to be filled with moaning and sighing. Wrong. Most of it is full of the boring meanderings of a wimpy, passive woman who is unhappy in her life but unsure how to change it. She gradually realizes that she’s leaving her husband behind in her journey, and fascinated by two other men – Sam Butterfield, who heads the sex institute where she does her research, and Jack, an old college friend who has long carried a torch for her. Without the phone sex conceit that gives this book the “erotica” label, it would be another standard “women’s fiction” tale of mid-life self-discovery, and not a very original one at that.

So, how’s the sex? Reasonably hot, what there is of it. In the course of her phone calls, Julia constructs lengthy fantasies of exhibitionism, sexual impulsiveness and occasional mild kink. She does capture the sense of exhilaration and empowerment that the work can sometimes give the operator – the “high” of spur-of-the-moment improvisation that puts the caller and you somehow in the same place out in electronic space somewhere. When it clicks like that, it can be amazing for both the caller and the operator.

When it doesn’t click, it’s work like any other. It’s customer service, casting around for a way to keep the caller happy and willing to call you back again another time. That’s the part that M.J. Rose doesn’t show, both because this is not a job that Julia desperately needs, and because frankly, operator ennui or panic isn’t all that sexy.

But there’s one scene where Rose is dead on. Once, I was talking on the phone with a male friend about my “younger” phone character – an 18 year old named Candy (at the time I was near 30). He scoffed at the idea that I could pull it off, and in response I shifted into my “phone voice” – and heard his startled reaction. It got to him, that easily, even though he knew it was me. That felt powerful and wild. In the book, Julia attempts to show Jack what it’s like on the phone by momentarily creates another personality, when she is face to face with him. His reaction was the same as my friend’s. It’s a strong scene and I wish there’d been more like it.

There’s a lot that Rose does not get right. I found Julia’s shock and revulsion at “dominatrix” calls amusing, especially since the story has her undergoing “training” at the Institute before she takes any calls. No one bothered to tell her that more than fifty percent of phone sex callers desire domination, or taught her how to pull it off? My biggest snort of disbelief, however, came when Julia is handed a $2,000 check for thirty hours of work. Honey, if it paid that well, I’d still be doing it.

If you are looking for a hot erotic novel, there are better books out there, especially since all phone sex stops midway through the book when a ludicrous quasi-thriller plot takes over. It’s also annoying that just like other portrayals of phone sex (see Spike Lee’s movie Girl Six, for example) there is a “punishment” for the woman who dares to do such work – in this case, contact with a repulsive man who may be abusing his step-daughter, and withering contempt from a female police detective whom Julia goes to for help. For a “daring” book, this is a disappointing lapse into sermonizing cliche.