Lafayette evokes the transgendered future as a metaphor for our own mortality. We must die, in order for our children to live on, but in a world of eunuchs, where will the children come from? For Lafayette, this is the central question.

In Lafayette's previous works, there were hints of the impending psychosis that has come to full flower in this opus. But Lafayette's madness is a boon, not a bane. "Descent of the Testicle" is the sort of book that could only be written when one is completely, totally mad, mad enough to see through the veil of Maya, mad enough to see that the ominous shape flapping in the background of your mind is your own penis, come to take you on a mystical journey of discovery.

At the journey's end, we discover that we are who we thought we were all along, and that the scrotum is paradise, "a place made safe by its walls." Lafayette ends where he began, a flustered soul tortured by his latex allergy.

Of course, there are those who will say that Lafayette's conviction of arachnophilia in Holland earlier this year casts a shadow over his reputation, but they can just stick a needle in it and inflate it until it pops.