#readinggoals2021 (No. 17 of 30)
#Pride2021 (No. 4 of 8)
June 6-21, 2021 (Read for 15 days)
CITY OF NIGHT
By John Rechy
Published by Grove Press
2013
What is Rechy’s City of Night for me? It was almost everything I have ever thought of when I was planning to write my own novel back in 2010. It tells about a Texan Hispanic hustler who toured America from East to West in search for meaning and higher calling.
I just loved that way Rechy orchestrates the type of ‘shallow’ relationship between sexual partners in the novel. There is an aching feeling that they should belong for each other, if this were indeed a romantic novel. But no, the anti-romantic twist is that Rechy disengages from the idealized form of love.
But in the end, in the chapter before the tumultuous ending during a Mardi Grass Parade, Rechy tried to speculate about love. In a brief encounter with one of his clients, the main character finally said: “Maybe you’re right: Maybe I would run away… I mean: that word — … ‘love’ …if such a thing exists as other than some sort of wayoff thing, Way Out There, somewhere — if it exists more than as merely four letters — like ‘fuck,’… well, I don’t really believe it… I guess the whole screwed-up world would have to change before I could feel that there was such a thing… And if there is such a thing as what you call ‘love,’ just the mention of it should send rockets into the sky.”
To which his client Jeremy responded: “Be careful… But it doesn’t have to be lie that. No rockets. Just the absence of loneliness. That’s love enough. In fact, that can be the strongest kind of love… When you don’t believe it’s even possible, then you substitute sex. Life becomes what you fill in with between orgasms. And how long does an orgasm last? People… people hunting different people every night — even someone they don’t really want: They close their eyes, pretend it’s someone else… The furtive, anonymous dumbshows in public toilets, in parks…”
The exchange between Jeremy and the main character is what encapsulates the whole novel, the silent search for love and life amid it all.
###
As I Burn the Books 