Calling Out [Paperback]

Rae Meadows (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 27, 2006

After being dumped by her boyfriend in New York, Jane quits her job, drives west and lands in Salt Lake City, where she takes a job answering phones at an escort agency.

She misses her boyfriend, mothers the escorts, and flirts with callers. She labors to feel needed and sexy—and the phone is a safe place to do both. But the pull of excitement and danger is too great, and her surroundings help Jane lose her tether on normalcy. Her boundaries blur. She inches toward a place that would once have been unthinkable. She becomes an escort. And then even that’s not enough.

Calling Out is about JaneÂ’s descent into the dangerous and lonely world of sexual commerce, and about what new parts of us can be revealed by bad behavior. ItÂ’s about Jane coming to terms with a life for which she had not hoped or planned, and about accepting that we sometimes find clarity, and community, in unlikely places.

The novel is one womanÂ’s journey from exile to understanding, in the both puritanical and libertarian state of Utah.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

After a rough breakup followed by a few months of wanly suicidal gestures like "switching to nonlight cigarettes, not washing my hands after the subway, forgoing my seatbelt and driving fast," Jane (no last name) packs her life in her car and leaves New York, headed west. When she stops in Utah and takes a job answering phones at a Mormon-approved escort service, she is adamant that she won't go any further into the sex trade than the front desk. But perhaps inevitably, she finds herself working as an escort and coming alive through her "dates." Although there is body contact, her new duties involve more playacting and kindness than full sex—which provides a foil for all the playacting and kindness she'd offered her ex, McCallister, who attempts to woo her back, tepidly, throughout. Meadows, making her debut, gives Jane a thoughtfully staccato first-person, but it isn't quite enough to wrestle larger insights from her racy, provocative premise. (June 27)
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Review

“Meadows displays strong narrative technique as she brings the disjointed culture of Mormon-ruled Salt Lake City and a group of disjointed 20-something Latter Day Sinners into high relief…a writer to watch.”
— Kirkus Reviews

"Rae Meadows' novel is a sexy, confident, totally winning debut...she brings the sordid world of the escort business into affecting and often hilarious relief. [She] is a shining talent."
–Darin Strauss, author of Chang and Eng and The Real McCoy

I recognize these dreamers and fallen angels from the books of Joan Didion and Hubert Selby and Denis Johnson, and here they spring to life in an unexpected place – the Great Salt Lake, the onetime American Holy Land that still draws wayward pilgrims. They are at once desperate and aspiring, lonely and hopeful: an escort making just a few more dates to pay for a root canal, a jack Mormon trying to impress a girl in a strip club by recounting the origins of his faith. In her own rush toward oblivion, our clearheaded heroine navigates among them without pity, but with a grace that ultimately make this a story not of loss, or sin, but of redemption.”
–Mark Sundeen, author of Car Camping and The Making of Toro

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Product Details

• Paperback: 280 pages
• Publisher: MacAdam/Cage (June 27, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 159692165X
• ISBN-13: 978-1596921658
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,092,525 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "I marvel at the escort's courage to face down another hotel room door.", July 4, 2006

By 

Luan Gaines "luansos" (Dana Point, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Calling Out (Paperback)

Can working in the shady world of escort services bring happiness? Is there redemption for the participants of such sleazy exploitation, especially in Utah, right in the heart of Mormon country? In a bizarre and fascinating tale of good women gone not-so-good, Roxanne works the phones at Premier Escorts, run by a frantic Arab, who also juggles two other businesses as an imported rug merchant and restaurateur. The escort office sandwiched between the other two venues, Roxanne's working environment consists of a windowless room with a phone, desk, television and adjoining tanning-changing room for the ladies. So far she hasn't crossed the line and become an escort, but mired in an emotional vacuum and generally directionless life, the thirty-year-old is balancing precariously.

Roxanne, or Jane (her real name), has a great deal of empathy for the outcall girls and for many of their regular customers, at the same time conducting a long-distance relationship with a former lover and allowing another ex-boyfriend, Ford, to use her apartment as a crash pad whenever he is in town. On his latest visit, Ford has brought along his girlfriend du jour, the free-spirited Ember, a cocaine-sniffing beauty who soon decides to explore the lifestyle of the outcall girl. Her days befuddled by the moral ambiguity of her job and an increasingly unsettled and crowded home life, Jane's quickly spirals out of control, smack in the middle of LDS territory.

Sometimes almost comic, at others much darker, Meadows reveals the inner workings of the escort service industry, avoiding the more venal aspects through license technicalities (although she hints that some girls take their duties much farther), the particular personalities drawn to this nether world and the human side of such an existence. Courting the chaos of confused identity, low self-esteem and lack of direction, Jane-Roxanne experiments at her own peril, crossing the boundaries of good judgment and healthy self-preservation once too often. With Ember as a catalyst, the distinctions between real life and her job are easily blurred, a shocking reminder how quickly events can turn life-threatening. This novel might have had more punch sans the happy ending, but, over all, Calling Out is instructive and insightful, Meadows a fresh and interesting voice on the scene. Luan Gaines/ 2006.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book was a surprise., July 6, 2006

By 

Nicole Del Sesto (Northern Cal) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Calling Out (Paperback)

A friend of mine picked up an advance readers copy of this book in New York. The author was featured in an emerging voices session. Authors that bear paying attention to. I couldn't agree more.

Calling Out surprised me, not because I'd never given much though to legal escort services in Utah, but because of the beauty of the book. The story moved quickly and the characters were so engaging that it only took a couple of pages to make them friends.

The story is beautifully written, with tender moments and a very accurate portrayal of humans, being human.

Don't pass this book up! You'll be glad you read it.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Calling Out, a sad and sweet first novel, July 16, 2006

By 

J. Sey "Jennifer Ann/book nerd" (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Calling Out (Paperback)

Wow. What a lovely first novel. Jane, Calling Out's heroine, travels west after a bad break up and unfulfilling advertising job come to an end in New York City. She finds herself answering phones at an escort agency in Salt Lake City, land of the Mormons. Its a slippery slope and not long before she finds herself going out on "dates". Lost and sympathetic, Jane's empathy for her clients makes her wholly relatable. Ultimately, she hits bottom when the escorting spirals out of control. Only then does she come to realize who she really is. Meadows spare and resonant prose evoke Didion's Play it as it lays. I can't wait for the next book by this promising author.