The Coming of the Night by John Rechy - LGBTQ+ Classic Novel - Perfect for Book Clubs & Literary Enthusiasts

Jesse, who is arguably the main character, only because the novel starts and ends with him, thinks, in the opening segment of the book, that he "[can] hardly wait for the coming of the night." The "the" in the title is significant, because the book is not about the coming of Jesse's night, of that particular night for all the characters--the events of the novel, apart from a single flashback that runs through one character's mind, taking place over one Saturday in the Summer of 1981--but about the coming of the night that is the AIDS epidemic. Because he is such a great novelist, Rechy's attitude to pre-AIDS gay promiscuity remains acutely ambiguous: on the one hand the book is drenched in lurid and emphatically unromantic sex; on the other, it offers a constant play on the martyrdom of such sex; of, as the character Clint muses at one point in the novel, "punishment for desire, sex that is no longer sex."I deeply regret my having missed a chance to study with Rechy at USC--his class was full by the time I registered--but I did meet him many years later and the meeting only emphasized his status in my mind as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century and as one of my own personal literary idols. His autobiographical debut novel--"City of Night," whose title this one deliberately evokes--is a literary masterpiece, to which this is a sort of poorer cousin; but the same technical craftsmanship, the deep pathos, the complexity ingeniously attained through the literary multiplication of social and physiological surfaces, and the equivocal exposé of urban America's glitzy nihilism are all there, as richly textured as ever. I lived very close to the world Rechy chronicles in this novel--and the work is as much a hymn to Los Angeles, to West Hollywood in particular, as it is a threnody for and a horrified valediction to a world long lost and possibly irrecoverable--so the resonances for me were doubly painful; but it would not be an exaggeration to say this novel does for the West Hollywood of the early 1980s what "The Day of the Locust" does for the Hollywood of the 1930s.The nuances and colors Rechy achieves through his miraculously close observation of West Hollywood, its pulse, its mystique, its unfathomable fusion of joy and desolation, are as vividly achieved as Proust's madeleine, which Rechy uses in his work as a carefully deployed symbol of his own. In fact the novel abounds in a brilliant subtext of symbol and allegory, not the least in its exploration of a priest's quest for a naked crucified Christ tattooed on the back of an eighteen-year-old male prostitute named Angel: these fiercely atonal symbols alone are, in all their fecundity, a delight to unravel and muse upon; but the novel succeeds primarily through its heartrending portrayal of the lives of ordinary people (unremarkable except for their beauty, the indomitable power and prolixity of their lust--their love for Maria Callas) shattered into a handful of literary shards looking for meaningful cohesion in the dream-laden heat of the City of Angels and predestined never to find it, because no such cohesion exists. Except in figments.