THE BOYS ACROSS THE STREET

A strange, pointless, highly offensive debut novel about a homosexual porn star who fantasizes about seducing the boys who study at the yeshiva across the street from him. Narrator Rick lives alone in a somewhat tumbledown section of Los Angeles. Once a successful actor in the Valley Boy demimonde of gay pornography, he is now reduced to occasional work as an extra in Hollywood. He spends most of his days reading Isherwood, Emerson, or Joyce and has vague ideas about trying his own hand at writing —a blasphemous, homoerotic gospel in the style of the 1611 King James Version of the Bible,— yet there’s a big distraction nearby: a boys— school for Hasidic Jews. Rick is fascinated not only by their youth, obviously, but also by his awareness that they consider him—as both a gentile and a homosexual—a lost soul. He becomes friendly with a few of them, gives them pornography, offers them blow jobs, and even begins to wear Hasidic garb. This quite understandably angers them; they insult him to his face and shoot him in the neck with a BB gun when his back is turned. Rick is a case study in personality disorder: An atheist, he detests Judaism as a murderous superstition, although he finds himself more and more strongly drawn to it as a means of possessing the schoolboys he is more and more obsessed with every day: —I wanted to hold Avi in my arms, and I wanted him to tell me he loved me, and I wanted him to come in my mouth, and I wanted him to see his God—in me.— Eventually his desire is consummated not in reality but in the manuscript of a novel he writes about —the boys across the street.— There is an ugly subgenre of gay fiction that appeals mainly to pedophiles, and Sandford’s work—prurient, vulgar, misogynistic, blasphemous, tasteless, pompous, and subliterate—falls deep within its bowels.