Customer Reviews

Rent Boy (High Risk Books)

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1 star:		(4)

 

 

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.

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.

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?

indiana is a good writer and the scene etc. is credible. The organ harvesting scheme in the later part of the book seems to contradict the "reality" of the first part. I'm sure all the people the character waits on, in his job as a waiter, are real or composites. I only "got" two, but if I was more involved in the scene, I'm sure I could make out the others. It's a very self-referential book, so maybe the organ stealing stuff is some elaborate parody of someone. I think Indiana does better with the less elaborate descriptions and parodies.

This Gary Indiana writing in the voice of a hustler is a hoot! He imagines it all, gets it wrong--probably heard it all wrong. Anybody who knows what it's really like will get a few laughs, unintended by Indiana (though he thinks he's very funny in his way-off views). No way, dude!

Gary Indiana writing about hustlers is like Danielle Steele writing about field laborers. His views are all heated fantasies, with little actual understanding or experience of what he writes. The situations are clearly fantasized, and so the book has an exaggerated quality to it--and such clumsy writing--that the only reason to finish it is to see how really bad it can get, and by the end you're not disappointed; it's at its worst. Indiana should write about what he knows, like about a plain, scholarly type writing a column for a paper, trying to be cool and not succeeding.

I picked up this book because of the title, and, man, did I go wrong! If this is the story of a hustler, then I don't know the scene--and I do; this is a book for anyone who doesn't know anything about the scene and wants to read what someone like this guy imagined it to be. I laughed aloud, but not where the writer intended.