BOOKS

Notices and reviews of books, articles, plays and poetry dealing with homosexuality and the sex variant. Readers are invited to send in reviews or printed matter for review.

CITY OF NIGHT by John Rechy, Grove Press, New York, 1963, 410 pp., $5.95.

Every so often there appears a book which, regardless of its intrinsic literary merit, makes an impact upon its particular audience which thousands of other and some better books never are able to do. A few years ago one such book was James Barr's Quatrefoil. Quatrefoil, because it was better written than most "gay novels," because it dared present sympathetically a homosexual love affair, because its principals were masculine and socially acceptable men, and because it made only slight deference to the accepted conventions of literary morality, not only took the gay world by storm, but also forced attention and critical comment from the literary world at large.

This summer another, but more significant and far more controversial book, has just appeared. Whatever its literary merits may be, it has already attracted great and generally favorable attention from the critics at large and will, I predict, become in homosexual circles, at least, the most talked of book of the decade. Just off the press it is already almost unobtainable. The book is, of course, John Rechy's City of Night. I hasten to add I compare City of Night and Quatrefoil only in terms of their effect upon their audience and in terms of what will someday be their places in the history of the gay novel; let no

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one think that I mean to compare them in content.

City of Night is, as you surely must already know, the story of a young male whore, or hustler, to use the politer term, who plies his trade across the face of America. It is doubtful that this is a novel at all; it is rather (and I hope, at least, that this is so) almost pure reporting, but it is selective and creative reporting as one might not only expect but demand of an artist. That it does not purport, however, to be factual or objective gives it a frightening and absorbing ring of truth and authority. Structurally it is not a novel either but a collection of episodes or vignettes (many of which have been published separately as such), tied loosely together by moments of introspection on the part of the nameless protagonist or by short narrative passages in which he relates his movements from one place to another. Always the narrator is but an observer, and there are little more than occasional and superficial references to his own activities which are, regrettably, never detailed nor explored. In this respect the book leaves us unsatisfied and unconvinced of the reality of the narrator who gives us the impression of being much too highly principled and too sensitive to be what he so openly declares himself to be. But it is in the sketches of the scores (or clients) of his fellow hustlers, of the mad queens and fetichists with whom the narrator comes in contact, that