Rent Boy (High Risk Books) [Paperback]

Gary Indiana (Author)

Book Description

Series: High Risk Books | Publication Date: January 1, 1993

The adventures of Danny, architectural student, waiter and rent boy, who escorts anyone - male, female or otherwise - who can afford him. Then his liaison with another rent boy involves him in a grisly organ selling ring. This black comedy exposes the fundamental immorality of modern society.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

New York City, 1991: Amy Fisher is arrested; an Exxon executive is kidnapped; and Indiana's protagonist is invited to join a plot to steal organs for transplanting. Indiana ( Horse Crazy ) initiates readers into the world of swanky homes, sleazy porn, drugs and murder. When not waiting tables, studying architecture, or out making private house calls, this X-rated novel's first-person narrator haunts gay bars and the Port Authority bus terminal, turning tricks. As for explicit and playfully exaggerated descriptions, "offbeat scenes break up the monotony" (as the narrator says of his clients' kinky preferences). The tone is extremely conversational, by turns monologue, diary and letter: "I know you're sitting in your apartment reading this and I said I'd tell you everything that happens to me and I will, but I'm like too wiped out to go on right now." Readers learn of various encounters retrospectively, as the narrator relates what are often frustrating asides to this brief novel's major thrust. The loose ends are knotted into a fast-paced drama in the book's conclusing sections, however, and those who can tolerate what seemed mere egocentric rambling will be justly rewarded.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

A hustler tells it like it is in this lively novella--the latest fiction from Indiana (Horse Crazy, 1989, etc.), longtime arts columnist for the Village Voice. Danny, a.k.a. Mark, a.k.a. Billy, has a crowded schedule. The 25-year-old hustler takes architecture courses at Rutgers, works as a gofer for a strung-out gay photographer, and waits tables at a hip writers' club in downtown Manhattan, as well as servicing his male clients (outcalls only) and drumming up new business in hustler bars and bus terminal toilets. Danny focuses on the scene (hustlers and johns locked together); the sex; the client fetishes that provide variety (``Fucking bores me to tears half the time''), and ``all the little slip-ups'' that could lead to HIV infection. It's a diverting tour: the eye is sharp, the style is loose, and the sex notably well-written. But Danny himself is an enigma. We get one glimpse of an abusive father, but ``I came from a dysfunctional family'' is, as he notes, every whore's story. Is he trapped in the life? Who are the ``close friends'' who have no idea he hustles? Who is the former john Danny is writing to (the novella is evidently a series of letters)? We don't know. We learn something about his best buddy, Chip, who despite his ``hustler head'' is ``defenseless...like a kid,'' but the relationship is not developed. Instead, halfway through, Indiana introduces a medical- suspense element: Chip's latest sugar-daddy, a sinister surgeon, wants the two hustlers to abduct a businessman, who will then be relieved of a kidney (at the least). But the caper, which turns gratuitously nasty, is a thrown-together affair and doesn't jibe with the earlier realism. Entertaining but shapeless work from a good writer. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: Serpent's Tail (January 1, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1852423242
• ISBN-13: 978-1852423247
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,766,431 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars image, December 6, 2000

By 

Graham Cooke - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rent Boy (High Risk Books) (Paperback)

why is everyone coming down so hard on this book? it was the first indiana book i read and lead me on to read his other books, and then on again to dennis cooper. "rent boy" is not entirely about plot, or reality, or relivance to the real world. it's a ficticious glimpse, a set of scenes from a world that either could be or is. it doesn't make a difference if this world "is" or "is not" because what's brilliant is the observation and the writing, the concept.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Who's the audience for this book, anyway...Me? You?, January 15, 2007

By 

Mark Nadja "Literary Outlaw, author *Hardcore... (New York City) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Rent Boy (High Risk Books) (Paperback)

Gary Indiana is a great writer without much of a discernible readership. He writes about predominately gay characters, but without the PC-endorsed viewpoint very often required by the gay community when portraying gay characters. In other words, these aren't the kind of gay people that make you think, "Oh if only the whole world were gay what a wonderful, loving, utopia it would be." No--this is gay people as really just another species of Homo Miserables. Fact is, Indiana doesn't portray anyone in a very sympathetic light, being of that rare class of unrelentingly misanthropic authors, among whom I proudly number myself, who don't have a lot good to say about human beings period.

Almost any Gary Indiana novel is good reading...*Gone Tomorrow,* *Do Everything in the Dark,* *Resentment,* *Depraved Indifference*...you could pick up anyone and not go wrong. Each offers Indiana's scathing indictment of the greed, envy, lust, betrayal, hypocrisy, and murderous impulses that flesh--hetero or homo--is unfortunately heir to. *Rent Boy* recommends itself in particular for its brevity--about 120 pages--and its sordid subject matter: male prostitution...seedy, perverted, and ultimately deadly. Although some reviewers have sort of spilled the beans on the plot in reviews south of this one, I'll refrain from going into specifics, except to say, that the "plot," per se, is not really what you're reading for here. Still, *Rent Boy* offers a solid, classic noir set-up with a chilling payoff in the closing pages.

In *Rent Boy* we follow the autobiographical exploits of "Danny"--a young male hustler who is writing letters to the presumed "author" of this book. Danny is a character type that readers might be familiar with from encountering his likes in the works of another much-maligned "gay" author--Dennis Cooper--as well as the Bret Easton Ellis of *American Psycho* and *Glamorama.* That being the good-looking, morally bereft, vacuous, upwardly mobile, status-seeking youth of today obsessed with sex, drugs, clothes, clubs, cash, and the state of his abs. In pursuit of the top of the line in all of the preceding, a lot of bad choices will be made. Well, not "choices" exactly. Characters like Danny don't really make choices. They just kind of drift into bad situations with little or no resistance.

What might go overlooked in all the mayhem is that Gary Indiana is a very fine and careful prose stylist. Sentence by sentence, image by image, he builds a vivid and disturbing view of the world that is as beautifully rendered as its very often unpleasant to see. He transmutes the gritty and disgusting into a dark poetry that is often comic, often perversely beautiful. His psychological autopsy of human nature and American pop culture is as incisive as a razor. He is a master satirist, every bit the equal of Ellis, who draws more of a fan base because his killers are heterosexual and his victims primarily female.

I'd say that I can't say enough good things about Gary Indiana, except I actually feel I have said enough. If you get a chance, read *Rent Boy.* It's a grim, slim, sick little shocker that at 120 pages will entertain you on an otherwise dull afternoon.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Dennis Cooper Lite, June 25, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Rent Boy (High Risk Books) (Paperback)

I was highly disappointed in this novella. It's a fast read, an afternoon's worth of fiction for a really slow reader like me. Gary Indiana obviously knows NYC hustling and all that, but there's no meat on the fictional bone. The style of the first person narration in the form of letters to an unknown recipient is copped straight from Dennis Cooper's "Frisk", whom Indiana obviously hopes to be compared to (I assume more flatteringly...) But the substance, the depth and introspection of the narrator in "Frisk" is totally lacking in "Rent Boy". Mostly, "Rent Boy" reads like a catty romp through the seedier side of the NYC gay social life. Which is its one redeeming quality. Indiana obviously has plenty of experience with the hustler/callboy/rentboy/cheap-restroom-teenage-runaway-blowjob scene, but the whole big medical organ-harvesting murder-mystery plot is just plain silly and it's frankly embarrassing to think we're actually expected to get absorbed in the plot. Maybe I missed the point... is it supposed to be high camp?