Sex With Strangers - Hardcover

Rees, Geoffrey

3.26

23 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374261652 ISBN 13: 9780374261658

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1993

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As he struggles to locate his feelings and to come to terms with love and sex, a young gay man engages in several ill-fated, passionate relationships. A first novel.

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From Kirkus Reviews:

An egregiously overwritten, underplotted, self-absorbed first novel about a young gay man's search for sex, friendship, and love. Thomas Hobart is fleeing his hometown of Worcester, Massachusetts, though why is anybody's guess; we learn nothing about his family background or past there. The 18-year-old New Englander plans to ``reinvent'' himself as a Chicago college student; his adventure begins on the train when he meets Dennis, the sexy conductor. During his freshman year, Thomas will have weekly trysts with Dennis, finding him good sex but rotten company. Friendship lies elsewhere, with charismatic graduate student Michael and his lesbian friends. In the company of these ``Pomo- Homos'' (postmodernist homosexuals), Thomas sharpens his wits and eases his loneliness, enjoying an innocent slumber party and a trip to the dunes. When he transfers to New York (school and area of study unspecified), sex and friendship come together in his love affair with impecunious painter Stuart, whose Brooklyn house he shares for two tumultuous years. Characters aren't well differentiated--Stuart (``a tornado of animal energy'') echoes Thomas's Chicago's friends ``swirling like a cyclone through Hyde Park''--and Thomas is so self-absorbed that he doesn't notice Michael has AIDS; all that counts are his violent emotional spasms, which leave him shaken and disoriented and his friends asking: ``What was that all about?'' Disregard the come-on title: Rees skittishly avoids the sex in Thomas's encounters. A pity--the play-by-play might have helped to cut through the solipsistic fog. -- Copyright �1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

The author of this fiction debut was a college student in both Chicago and New York--the two cities in which the novel is set. As if to prove his familiarity with these locales, Rees includes an overabundance of references to streets, landmarks and other local identity tags. Readers may wish he had applied similar verisimilitude to the personalities of his characters. As an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, Thomas Hobart, the protagonist, is "adopted" by a group of academic poseurs given to fatuous pronouncements ("beauty is nothing but a veil for death and destruction") and smart labels such as "Pomo-Homos" (postmodern homosexuals). Later, Thomas pursues student life in New York, there encountering another eccentric band, virtually indistinguishable from his Chicago companions. Though Thomas is gay, there is a surprising lack of emotional connection among any of the characters. Thomas's furtive same-time-next-week sexual liaison in Chicago and a relationship in New York seem to indicate the futility of romantic attachments, and these "strangers" remain as distanced from the reader as from one another. There is not much action here, nor any revelatory insights; and while some descriptive passages convey atmosphere, they're generally verbose.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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