Rating: 
Summary: Starts out great but fizzles; not as good as Dream Boy
Review: Being a huge fan of Dream Boy, I was very excited to hear that Jim Grimsley had written a book about my hometown of New Orleans. However, I was disappointed overall and did not think it was as good as his earlier work.The story starts out strong in portraying Newell as the naive country boy exploring a new city. The description of locations in New Orleans is dead-on, detailing the Bourbon Pub, Cafe Lafitte, Cafe du Monde, Clover Grille, etc. You can really get into his struggles in trying to hold down a job and get settled. You're hooked by the time he finds the job in the adult store. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, the book goes off on this loooong tangent about Miss Sophie, the transgendered janitor of the store where Newell works. Who cares!? Page after page, nothing happens but her getting drunk and wandering the streets aimlessly. I started to think that I was just reading a collection of short stories: first Newell, then Miss Sophie. By the time the story did come back to Newell, I had lost interest. He turned into a queeny whore who had taken a liking to wear dog collars at work and hooking up with drug addicts. The story ends with a whimper in a tasteless scenario for Newell. It's like Mr. Grimsley had run out of adventures for Newell to go on so he wraps it up fast. Hopefully his next novel, like Dream Boy, will be more focused...
Rating: 
Summary: interesting start then the plot goes awry...
Review: BOULEVARD started out promisingly enough with a young man named Newell coming from small-town Alabama to the "big-city" lights and action of 1970s New Orleans. We follow Newell's day-to-day adventures, such as they are at times, in settling into a life in the Big Easy. There's a motley cast of characters, many of whom befriend Newell and help him find his way in his new gay, adult life. The few sex scenes found in the book can hardly be described as graphically explicit, so ignore those reviewers who make such claims. Those scenes are more descriptive of the places than the sex acts taking place. At about the half-way point, the author introduces an irrelevant and mostly uninteresting side-story about the transvestite janitor who cleans the adult bookstore/theater where Newell works. Her story takes up too many pages and doesn't move the action along at all. Overall I felt rather depressed for Newell after reading BOULEVARD. This is not so much a tragedy, but it is a rather sad gay young man's life from a different era.
Rating: 
Summary: Great read, more for entertainment than anything else.
Review: Grimsley is a beautifully gifted writer. This novel, Boulevard, lacks his previous explorations on the quiet desperation of true love. It does, however, keep the wonderfully constructed portraits of characters and the interesting plotline. The story traces an awkward, somewhat cliche, coming-of-age of a country boy who comes to the Big Easy. By the end of the novel, one is not sure if the boy has really changed, or if he has just become more 'experienced' in terms of cultural exchange/experience, etc. But perhaps Grimsley's finer point is made on that assumption: escape allows you to experience something new...but escaping will not change who or what you are. His power lies in his vocabulary and the languid, melancholy descriptions of heartache. The twisted characters he introduces and the interesting plot twists are not to be missed. Ironically, it is one of the minor characters (who actually gets more presence than most minor characters would) that charmed me the most. An aging drag queen comments on the lives of the characters around her, on her own life, and the quiet damnation of being an older transgendered man. Emotionally, I do not cling to this novel as I did Comfort and Joy, Winter Birds, and Dream Boy, but it did not seek out to make the reader cling to it. It is an expertly told story.
Rating:
Summary: It's not profound, but a fine add. to Grimsley's catalogue
Review: Grimsley's writing makes this story more interesting than it would be in the hands of someone less adept -- he successfully creates this N'Orleans atmosphere, specifically having to do with a handful of gay hangouts that our main character Newell will discover. There's a hammy characterization of many of the characters -- we can practically feel the venality of Mac, the manager of the bookstore where Newell works. Occasionally the language is affected ("they couldn't be called private at all"), but I think that for the most part it's necessary for giving the novel the druggy mood it has -- the feeling of being on acid, or coming off a hangover, or in the midst of sexual ecstasy. It's a cast of eccentrics, and the affectation works in helping create their familiar mannerisms.
It's not a bad effort (though someone had written "what a dull book" on one of the last pages in my copy), but it doesn't have much momentum, that sense of urgency that "Dream Boy" has. It's a story that exists in a world (which I think is very well-created -- the bookstore is a character in itself, with characters twirling out of it), except what happens in that world isn't terribly compelling. There is a continued interest in the notion of escaping oneself, whether through literal or metaphysical means, and it's a nice play on the boy-moves-to-city theme, but it doesn't transcend it into something truly special -- it exists as something pleasantly strange.
Rating: 
Summary: Not Worth Walking Down this "Boulevard"
Review: I am a big fan of Jim Grimsley's work but was disappointed with his latest novel which reads juvenilely and works more effectively as a character study than an actual novel. I kept thinking as I read this novel that Mr. Grimsley was writing a screenplay or a script for the theatrical stage. What I do like in this work was the liberation of the central character Newell, who comes to New Orleans seeking a life he can only dream about, hence escaping the small town life of Pastel, Alabama. In some respects Newell's life mirrors my own experience when I moved to Chicago. Newell's sexual odyssey is what drives the novel, and the other notable characters as Ms. Sophia (A mentally deranged transvestite who works in the adult bookstore with Newell) Mac (the greasy, loud, bossy manager of the adult bookstore) and Mark (Newell's on-then-off again druggey boyfriend) fill in as bit players developed well enough to the point of passing interest for the reader. The ending of the novel seems a bit rushed and not well thought out as Newell decided to return to small town life, defeated by all the sexual imagery and freedom that surrounded him on a daily basis. There is no build for Newell's decision and hence, no empathy for me as a reader. I can only hope that Mr. Gimsley next literary effort will be as rich as the one I experienced with "Dream Boy" and "Comfort and Joy."
Rating:
Summary: Disjointed, lost its focus
Review: I am a fan of Jim Grimsley's work, I throrougly enjoyed his novel DREAM BOY and I looked forward to reading this book. It started out promising, following the life of Newell, a country boy trying to find his place in a big city. It focused on him trying to find a place, find a job, have enough money to be able to pay rent, real problems. Then he started interacting, he found a job at a restaurant where he was later fired for not wanting to get involved with his boss. He finds a job at an adult book store, where he befriends various people. The book starts to lose its focus around here, going on to Miss Sophie, a transgendered janitor with problems. Getting drunk, wandering aimlessly wondering. What happened? By the time it got back to Newell I had lost my interest, the focus of the book was lost right then and there. It was like separate stories, that didn't quite intertwine quite well. When it got back to Newell he became unlikeable, a queeny type character who hooked up with drug dealers and liked to wear dog collars. What happened to the character? It was like two completely different people, the Newell from the beginning of the book and then the person he transformed into. It was a hard book to follow. Hopefully his next novel is more impressive, this had promise but it lost its focus.
Rating:
Summary: Sexy story of a boy from Alabama
Review: I could not put this book down. Great story and even better characters. Explores life in New Orleans during the late 70s and it is quite the bizarre.. full of sensous moments and characters that are deeper than their appearance, I highly recommend this book.
Rating: 
Summary: A Busy Boulevard of Unbroken Hope
Review: I've been a huge fan of Jim Grimsley ever since I first discovered Dream Boy while in a bookstore one day looking for nothing yet somehow finding everything. His writing is so simple, yet quite moving. His characters are quite detailed, and you find yourself caring about what happens to them quite quickly. The same is for his latest, Boulevard. Again, the writing is intricate in detail and easy to follow. I read over half of it in the first setting. I found myself caring very deeply about what happened to Newell as he began to discover himself on the streets of New Orleans. I felt like I was right there with him, since I had visited before and knew the streets and places quite well. However, the editorial reviews spoil the story for you. I rather enjoy the story being as simple as it is, but I knew what was going to happen to Newell right from the very beginning. I also didn't enjoy the change in the point of view in the last parts of the book. I wanted less of those characters, and more of Newell. Newell's parts were much more detailed, and I cared about him much more. The other characters refer to Newell and offer their opinions of him, but I found myself missing him while reading their thoughts and pages. Kudos to Jim for another great work, but I think his better reads lie within the shorter stories with less characters.
Rating:
Summary: Yet another small-town-boy-meets-big-city
Review: Since the early 1970s, hundreds (perhaps thousands) of novels have been written with the same basic plot: a young and naive man, graced with wide-eyed innocence and (always) extremely good looks, arrives in a big city from a small town, realizes his gay sexual awakening, and spirals downward into an underground filled with debauchery, danger, and bad music. This territory has been mined so often (and continues to dominate the debut efforts of many up-and-coming novelists) that established writers dare to trespass in this realm only if they could deliver something unique. Unfortunately, "Boulevard" is anything but. Grimsley is a confident writer whose prose is unadorned and meticulous, but his writing can't save the hackneyed plot. The novel's central character, Newell, leaves small-town Alabama, and the novel's first page (correction: the first sentence!) describes him getting off the bus in New Orleans in 1976. This B-novel cliche is followed by 120 pages of formula--first time going to a gay bar, first sniff of amyl nitrate, first joint, first visit to a pornographic bookstore (where Newell ultimately lands a job), first sexual encounter, etc. In addition, there are flaccid descriptions of famous French Quarter landmarks that could have been lifted from Fodor's. The prose here is so detached, so cynical, so clinical that it conveys no emotional impact: at one point, Newell reflects on his first night of drinking and dancing as a "nice evening" of "pleasant places"--an impression that the previous twenty pages absolutely does not convey. It's hard to say if Grimsley means to suggest that Newell is a vapid reporter of his so-called life or if he means to condemn the excesses of gay life in New Orleans. After this first chapter, "Boulevard" takes a sharp turn and hints at what this novel could have been. Grimsley shifts the story's style and point of view: first to Miss Sophia, an older, schizophrenic transsexual who works with Newell in the bookstore, then to Mark, Newell's drug-addled boyfriend, and a final chapter (as well as a coda of sorts) that, with whiplash rapidity, switches perspectives among the several characters introduced throughout the book. Interspersed is a journal written by a nineteenth-century neighbor of a notorious woman who imprisoned and tortured her slaves. As others have noted, the chapter about Miss Sophia seems entirely out of place in this novel, but I thought it daring and believable; on its own, it would have made a great short story or the kernel of another novel altogether. As a whole, however, these last three chapters don't attempt to make the characters more believable (they certainly don't illuminate the reasons for Newell's sudden downfall and his equally sudden epiphany at the end of the book), and they tantalize the reader with the silhouette of an entirely different--and possibly better--novel.
Rating:
Summary: Great read, more for entertainment than anything else.
Review: Was Jim Grimsley half-asleep when he wrote this novel? His fiction is usually powerful and moving, and I love his work, but Boulevard is a depiction of characters we don't care about in a plot that goes nowhere, but, thankfully ends eventually. A supreme disappointment. Read anything by him but this half-hearted effort.
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