The City Kid (Gay Men's Fiction) Review
I first discovered Paul Reidinger's work many years ago with his novel The Best Man. I was astonished by that book. Reidinger took as his subject a near universal experience of gay life which, paradoxically, had been largely ignored by the official gay litterati. Show me a gay man who hasn't experienced at least an infatuation (if not a full on romance) with a closeted guy determined to marry, father children, and pass for straight, and I'll show you a gay man who's only been out of the closet himself for about fifteen minutes. Reidinger's handling of that subject matter is scrupulously honest and at the same time beautifully told. In The City Kid, he once again treads ground multitudes of mature gay men have tread before him. The story of a middle aged gay man entangled in a bizarre relationship with a monumentally confused adolescent can't help but be messy and discomforting, but it's a realistic one. Reidinger doesn't so much create his characters as report the experiences of living, breathing human beings, flawed as they are and boring as they can occasionally be. He tells us the truth about people and relationships. He deals with issues and situations few authors will attempt to write about. They're not glamorous or particularly sexy, and they demand a degree of integrity in their portrayal which many writers simply won't bother to muster. This novel may not be the most entertaining one you'll ever read, but it will be one of the most thought provoking ones. And for fans of The Best Man, there's the additional treat of revisiting the main characters of that novel twenty some years later. If you don't like books that make you think, you probably won't like this one. But if fiction is more than brain candy for you, then you're making a mistake not reading this book.
The City Kid (Gay Men's Fiction) Overview
In The City Kid, Guy Griffith, gay, 40, and less than satisfied with the current state of his life, comes to San Francisco like many before him--as a refugee from some intimacy gone disastrously wrong in the huge nation east of the bay. When he meets sixteen-year-old Doug Whitmore on a ridge overlooking a nude beach, he surrenders with pleasure to the boy's radiant adolescent energy. Guy doesn't yet understand how deeply rooted Doug's hurts and confusions are, nor how dangerous they might come to be, and he is not entirely willing to admit, even to himself, how susceptible he is to the fugitive attraction that he and Doug both feel.
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