Rent Boy

by Gary Indiana Narrated by Tom Beyer

Overview

A noir tour-de-force set in the world of hustlers from "one of America's darkest and funniest chroniclers." (The Guardian)



It's New York City, 1981, and everyone wants to be at the Emerson Club, from Cindy Crawford to Cindy Adams; from Famous Roger, one-time lion of the talk shows, to Sandy Miller, the "downtown" writer with the tattoos and the leather; from Lauren Hutton to the art star who does the thing with the broken plates. Everyone, that is, except Danny. Danny just works there, waiting tables to put himself through architecture school, turning tricks on the side. And when he's not on the clock, he's recording the sexual, aesthetic, and financial transactions that make up his life, in gruesome detail. But even a clever boy like Danny can wind up on the menu. Blinded by love for his fellow rent boy, Chip-as gorgeous as he is reckless-Danny is about to learn that there's more than one way to turn your body into cash, and that cynicism is no defense when the real scalpels come out. A gimlet-eyed crime novel with an inventively filthy mind, Rent Boy is Gary Indiana at his most outrageous-and his best.



Contains mature themes.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's 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. (Jan.)

Los Angeles Times Book Review - Michael Harris

A funny book with a high degree of linguistic sophistication. It also contains all the four-letter words, plus graphic descriptions of sex, kinky perversions, drug abuse and mayhem . . . Danny, the ‘rent boy’ of the title, is . . . a distant, debauched cousin of Holden Caulfield—a youthful truth-teller who sees himself surrounded by phonies.

Fantastic Fiction

A relentless stream of social commentary, careening between sex, comedy, and murder, Rent Boy is a hysterical romp through the worlds of contemporary culture and crime."

The Critic - John Self

It is literature with the filter off: on the one hand, an account of life as lived outside mainstream acceptance; on the other, a telling entirely unrestrained by political correctness . . . In a short space, Rent Boy is a multi-faceted little gem, a world of ‘Versailles at 78rpm,’ and the sort of funny, sick, weird little book you never forget.

Cleveland Review of Books - Bailey Trela

Gary Indiana is the patron saint of human detritus . . . Rent Boy is a frolicsome slip of a book . . . a relentlessly tropey, shamelessly over-the-top potboiler . . . A rude glamor radiates from the book’s prose . . . There’s the instinct to high literature, the pitch-perfect imitations of noir, the estrangement and anhedonia exquisitely expressed.

Bookforum - Sarah Nicole Prickett

Indiana, a playwright, art critic, artist, and novelist with the sensibility of a rogue private investigator, is edgy in two or three ways. He’s hip and unchill, he’s lived on the edges of a lot of things, like fame and Los Angeles.

New York Magazine - Christian Lorentzen

[Indiana’s] novels mark him as the nearest thing we have to an inheritor to the Burroughs strain in American fiction. That’s the strain that breaks or simply ignores middle-class taboos; embraces narcotics and all kinds of sex; takes an interest in the uglier emotions, like disgust, shame, and hatred; applies actual pressure to American myths (the Western, the P.I., the gangster); has recourse to science fiction and narrative fracture; keeps its eye on the varieties of societal control (family, state, corporation, media); and doesn’t shy away from anything that might be mistaken for sin.

Interview Magazine - Chris Kraus

[A] literary legend and cultural hellraiser . . . [Rent Boy is] his sleazy-genius book.

The Baffler - Adrian Nathan West

An inheritor, perhaps, of early Burroughs or John Rechy or Alexander Trocchi, or a ‘fixture,’ as journalists like to say, among the writers and artists who congregated around Manhattan’s East Village in the 1980s . . . Gary Indiana is still there, developing the vivid ire and grit of his early works into a sulfurous dissection of the American character that has few if any rivals.

New York Times Book Review - Lori Soderlind

Indiana’s views penetrate so far beyond the usual pabulum that it requires a bit of moral courage to read them, and a dark sense of humor would also help . . . a peerless voice, one that describes a falling floor that may never find its bottom.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940190991413
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	12/24/2024
Edition description:	Unabridged