HAVE YOU SEEN ME?

An inconsistent debut about a young woman’s cavalier escapades in the sex industry.

Juliet, the daughter of intellectual hippies, has a fairly conventional childhood in Santa Cruz, California (barring the death of her mother in Julia’s childhood and a sexual encounter at 16 with a friend of her father’s), which makes what follows all the more puzzling. After a college degree in psychology and dance, Juliet moves to San Francisco, gets an apartment in the Tenderloin, a job as a stripper, and speed-freak Mary as a best friend. Her move from college grad to sex worker is both swift and inexplicable for one who has neither an interest in sex nor a desperate need for quick cash. When Juliet moves on to pornography, we’re told that our heroine is impatient and the lure of fast money is too much to pass up. Soon prostitution becomes her means of income, and she develops an exclusive relationship with a conservative radio talk-show host, a thinly veiled real-life portrait here named David Slaughter. When Juliet’s apartment building burns down and she’s fired from dancing at the Cherry Tree (for giving a client hepatitis), she joins Mary at an eco-commune in the Santa Cruz mountains. What follows is simply . . . what follows. Without an emotional connection to what has preceded it or a sense of reflection as to what the past few years might have meant, the conclusion is better suited to a conventional coming-of-ager than a picaresque tale of a happy hooker. In fact, Juliet’s “why not” attitude about her sex jobs has so little foundation in her character that it seems nothing more than a convenience of plot. That said, Denham’s language is often witty and likable, and the story trots along happily from one raunchy pursuit to the next.

Not focused or insightful—or particularly sexy: altogether, a first novel that fails to get inside the heart and mind of its young adventurer.