For an unsuccessful novel, it has certainly been published enough times. According to Goodreads, there are 60 editions of this short and intense novel and I suppose it’s almost certainly because of the amazing movie that was made of it, with Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight, which gave us the almost quintessential New York scream. “I’m walkin’ here!”
I wanted to read this because both Hoffman and Voight read it to prepare for their roles and they both realized that the characters were gay. I’m not sure and I’m not sure that sexuality was actually the point.
It’s probably important, when discussing the novel, to emphasize that the character Joe Buck is the protagonist. It is not Rico “Ratzo” Rizzo, even though Dustin Hoffman plays him so well and so memorably. Joe goes the longest distance, makes the most difficult choices and goes through the most change. By the end, I think what you come to feel is that even the unlikeliest person can end up bringing meaning to our lives — and specifically, the meaning that you get by caring for someone.
When Joe starts off on his journey, all he really knows is that he has a big dick and that women like it. He has this fantasy of becoming a gigolo in New York City and is fairly quickly disabused of that notion. The movie and the script of the movie makes it seem like he goes into a “downward” sort of spiral, and ends up on the street, hustling for gay men. But that level of hustling, if you want to call it “low” and being a gigolo to rich ladies as “high,” happens very early in the novel and I don’t think it’s really meant to be seen as a kind of degradation. What degrades him, in a sense, is having to suffer in New York City.
I was reminded by this of how often New York has been depicted as a dangerous, tough, and dispiriting place: a place that will beat you down and that you must conquer. It really wasn’t until Seinfeld, and to a lesser extent, Friends, that New York started to take on the character of something that could be fun. And then of course Sex and The City was like an earthquake in that sense. People started coming here to enjoy their Sex and The City tours.
Are they gay? I don’t know. I’m not sure that it matters. Toward the end of the book, in order to get enough money to take Ratzo a bus down to Miami, Joe does some serious gay bashing which the victim seems to like and accept as a kind of punishment for indulging in his desires, smiling as he’s beaten. He doesn’t differentiate too much in his own mind about the difference between a woman and a man, although I don’t think he ever penetrates the men — he lets them, as he puts it, “hang off his pole.”
And then there’s just the plain stupidity. Joe is a dumb person — might even have a learning disability.
But it saddens me that James Herlihy killed himself at the age of 66. He seemed to have had a number of books published as well as some plays performed. He was also friends with Tennessee Williams and Anais Nin so it wasn’t like he was just an obscure writer with nothing to his name. He’s the kind of writer that I think should have had a small biography written — nothing large or too major — just enough to give us a sense of his life. Not every biography needs to be 1,000 pages. But 30 or so — that might have been useful.