7/8/2023 0 Comments City of night rechyIt's 1981 in West Hollywood, and the novel rotates point of view among a mostly gay cast that includes hustlers, a priest, a drag-queen porn director and auteur wannabe, and various men who spend the day planning to make the eponymous night as sexually fulfilling as possible.īut unlike "City of Night," "The Coming of the Night" lacks a narrator or any overarching consciousness to guide us through its characters' heads. In his new novel, "The Coming of the Night," Rechy returns to familiar territory. Although it was promoted as a glimpse into America's sleazy gay underworld, what made a classic of John Rechy's first novel, "City of Night," was its unshakable innocence: Through endless gay sexual encounters full of humiliation, terror and self-loathing, the novel's hustler narrator never stops listening for "a voice from a childhood in the wind."Įven the novel's modernist tics - apostrophes are omitted from contractions, words are jammed up against each other to produce adjectives such as "sugargrimy" to describe a boy's hands - contribute to the book's youthful optimism, as if salvation could come from James Joyce as easily as from a kind priest at the far end of a late-night phone call.
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