City of Night

Rating:
Summary: Looking for love in the cities of night
Review: "City of Night" is a novel that I haven't read in about eight years, but its storyline and poetic prose still lingers in my mind to this day. It is a sad yet beautiful story of a young, nameless, faceless, street hustler that roams the large cities of the U.S. looking for love in a homosexual relationship. But the main character is sexually confused. He continually claims to be straight, however he has sex with men for money. Paying for sex with another man is not an act of a "fairy", according to the character. This is a myth of the streets. He is gay, but he hates himself for it, leaving the main character to learn to accept himself while going through the tarnish streets of New York, LA, and finally New Orleans. The majority of characters within the novel live on the fringes of society, and they all have poignant stories of their pasts, but no real direction for their future. Our hero sweeps acorss the country traveling through the pre-Stonewall gay community and finds a motley crew of flawed but colorful characters. We can sympathize with charcters like Pete, Skipper, Miss Destiny, Sylvia, bacuse they all want what we want: love, acceptance, desirability, a second chance. This book is not a "gay" novel, rather it is a novel that uncovers the loneliness and desparation that we all have felt sometime in our lives. It is a piece of fiction that is indispensable in the canon of 20th century literature. A brilliant work!!!!!

Rating:
Summary: Looking for love in the cities of night
Review: "City of Night" is a novel that I haven't read in about eight years, but its storyline and poetic prose still lingers in my mind to this day. It is a sad yet beautiful story of a young, nameless, faceless, street hustler that roams the large cities of the U.S. looking for love in a homosexual relationship. But the main character is sexually confused. He continually claims to be straight, however he has sex with men for money. Paying for sex with another man is not an act of a "fairy", according to the character. This is a myth of the streets. He is gay, but he hates himself for it, leaving the main character to learn to accept himself while going through the tarnish streets of New York, LA, and finally New Orleans. The majority of characters within the novel live on the fringes of society, and they all have poignant stories of their pasts, but no real direction for their future. Our hero sweeps acorss the country traveling through the pre-Stonewall gay community and finds a motley crew of flawed but colorful characters. We can sympathize with charcters like Pete, Skipper, Miss Destiny, Sylvia, bacuse they all want what we want: love, acceptance, desirability, a second chance. This book is not a "gay" novel, rather it is a novel that uncovers the loneliness and desparation that we all have felt sometime in our lives. It is a piece of fiction that is indispensable in the canon of 20th century literature. A brilliant work!!!!!

Rating:
Summary: A Great Book to Read!
Review: A wonderfully compelling (and sometimes disturbing) look into the world of hustling. The first time I read it I couldn't put it down! Totally captivating!!

Rating:
Summary: Not just a "gay" novel. . .
Review: Although that is one of its facets. This book, both for all of its cynicism, has a generosity towards the human race, encompassing and striving to understand those who are its most marginalized members: sexual minorities, hustlers, bums, floozies, drunks, junkies. . .all of those who are traditionally swept under the mat. I haven't read it since I was twenty, but in those long-ago, mid-80's days, I read it to tatters, and I've never forgotten it (and I'm a straight-but-not-narrow female). Read it. You'll remember it always.

Rating:
Summary: The book is a classic.
Review: City by Night by John Rechy is a classic. I had to read it when I did a paper on the history of homosexuality for my history class. That was twenty years ago, before I had ever gone to the US. Now that I am a priest and my parents live there, and I have gone there to the US myself many times over, the book seems like a fossil frozen in time before the advent of AIDS and Mayor Rudy Giuliani's cleansing of Times Square and the closure of bath houses in Los Angeles (I remember I had just arrived in LA and the closure of bath houses was bannered in the papers. John Holmes had just died of AIDs and his death was not given prominence. A feature story appeared in the front page, prominently boxed. It was about a sparrow that died in Santa Monica Beach. A lady wanted to save it so she called for the Red Cross. The Red Cross team arrived, but the sparrow died nonetheless.) Now the novel, as I say, may be a fossil already if not yet a relic. But the bathos of the novel still haunts the crevices of one's mind, and the memory of having read the book sort of makes me giddy because with the book the jukebox, the flower people, the subculture of the third sex, the Vietnam War and the unfished America Dream spring back to life. Side by side with the computer and the Generation X, however, the novel recedes into the past, like Casablanca, like the old, original Heaven Can Wait, like the westerns of Randolph Scott (when his playing good buddy with housemate Cary Grant never generated suspicious snickers), when the world was young and everything seemed so greeen, before the El Nino phenomenon, before the devirginization of the moon by the Apollo, before the advent of the incoming millennium and the forthcoming century, before the transformation of splendid fiction into reportage plain and simple. City of Night is fiction at its best and will remain so forever.

Rating:
Summary: dated and insipid
Review: Each epidsode in this stitched-together book is so flat and tepid that the book as a whole doesn't even really manage to be episodic. The reason this book is famous is because it was the first to deal openly with gayness. Nowadays, you can watch TV and see questions about famous gay people and events on game shows, for crying out loud. This book is so dated, it's not even funny. And none of the characters come alive, including the narrator. If you want to read a good book about this same sort of milieu, check out Hubert Selby Jr.'s "Last Exit To Brooklyn". If you're gay and you're desparate to find traces of gayness in the media, I suppose "City of Night" will satisfy you for a day or two.

Rating:
Summary: dated and insipid
Review: Each epidsode in this stitched-together book is so flat and tepid that the book as a whole doesn't even really manage to be episodic. The reason this book is famous is because it was the first to deal openly with gayness. Nowadays, you can watch TV and see questions about famous gay people and events on game shows, for crying out loud. This book is so dated, it's not even funny. And none of the characters come alive, including the narrator. If you want to read a good book about this same sort of milieu, check out Hubert Selby Jr.'s "Last Exit To Brooklyn". If you're gay and you're desparate to find traces of gayness in the media, I suppose "City of Night" will satisfy you for a day or two.

Rating:
Summary: Enjoyable - But Not An Easy Read
Review: I guess my tipoff should have been the word "classic" used in so many previous reviews. Yep, it sure reads like one. Reminds me of high school and Shakespeare. I'm a reasonably intelligent guy and I found this one to be extremely difficult to understand. The style is so poetic and chock full of metaphors as to really obscure meaning a lot of the time. It often took great concentration on my part to even understand some of the metaphysical arguments the protagonist had going on in his head continually. Nonetheless, I did finish the book out of curiosity, and I have to say I did enjoy a good bit of this novel. It does indeed paint a what I guess is realistic picture of streetlife. And boy it's grim! I certainly felt for the main character. This is just not a style of writing that I particularly enjoy. Perhaps I am just not sophisticated enough. For those looking for something one doesn't need a doctorate in philosophy to comprehend, I recommend Like People in History by Felice Picano, The Front Runner by Patricia Nell Warren, Frontiers by Michael Jensen, Dream Boy by Jim Grimsley, And The Band Played On by Randy Shilts and The Best Little Boy in the World by John Reid.

Rating:
Summary: Enjoyable - But Not An Easy Read
Review: I guess my tipoff should have been the word "classic" used in so many previous reviews. Yep, it sure reads like one. Reminds me of high school and Shakespeare. I'm a reasonably intelligent guy and I found this one to be extremely difficult to understand. The style is so poetic and chock full of metaphors as to really obscure meaning a lot of the time. It often took great concentration on my part to even understand some of the metaphysical arguments the protagonist had going on in his head continually. Nonetheless, I did finish the book out of curiosity, and I have to say I did enjoy a good bit of this novel. It does indeed paint a what I guess is realistic picture of streetlife. And boy it's grim! I certainly felt for the main character. This is just not a style of writing that I particularly enjoy. Perhaps I am just not sophisticated enough. For those looking for something one doesn't need a doctorate in philosophy to comprehend, I recommend Like People in History by Felice Picano, The Front Runner by Patricia Nell Warren, Frontiers by Michael Jensen, Dream Boy by Jim Grimsley, And The Band Played On by Randy Shilts and The Best Little Boy in the World by John Reid.

Rating:
Summary: Surprisingly good
Review: I say "surprisingly" because Rechy is seldom considered one of our finest writers. That's too bad, really, because "City of Night" turns out to be miles better than most of the laborious Great American Novels that sprang up like so many red, white, and blue weeds during the 50's and 60's. As a look at an important subculture, this novel is amazingly comprehensive, with many memorable character portraits, and feels entirely authentic. Better yet, Rechy manages to imbue the nameless protagonist's trials with real emotional gravity, up to and very much including the pensive, haunting conclusion. The prose manages to be rich and florid without seeming overwrought; it reads very well. I could be snippy and blast Rechy for some forced attempts at Meaning late in the proceedings, but these feel like minor flaws compared to the sweep of the novel as a whole. It is, at very least, a minor classic.