Midnight’s Child : THE COMING OF THE NIGHT: A Novel; By John Rechy; Grove Press; 256 pp., $24

When John Rechy’s first novel, “City of Night,” appeared in 1963, there had never been anything quite like it. Told from the cool perspective of a restless male hustler, working in what used to be called “trade,” the book was a carny tour of “the homosexual underworld” (as it was routinely called) of urban America, taking in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and New Orleans. It captured with cruel accuracy the wide spectrum of neuroticism produced in the homosexual minority by extreme social oppression. Rechy’s hero moved through a world that, if not strictly frozen into a settled pattern, had shifted little in its rituals for many years, invisible to the society at large. Rechy’s book fully exposed what had been offered only in quick, lurid glimpses from time to time in American novels and, even more rarely, American films: A half-minute peek into a gay bar, in Otto Preminger’s “Advice and Consent,” was enough in those days to send chills through a theater audience.

It would be many years before a blurring of gender roles made “the homosexual” a less instantly identifiable and brutally stigmatized, social type and even more years before the thickly encrypted ghetto culture of camp, extravagant role-playing and rampant self-loathing would come to seem, when it occasionally still appeared, quaint residue of a vanished world.

The breadth of Rechy’s survey was one of its virtues. Another was its urgent, syntax-scrambled style, a wonderful shock to the reading eye, like that of Hubert Selby’s “Last Exit to Brooklyn” and William Burroughs’ “Naked Lunch.” “City of Night” was distinctly a Beat novel, rangy and full of bold riffs as a Charlie Parker album. Rechy displayed a throwaway brilliance at describing crowded bars, city neighborhoods, bodies, faces, the costumes and cubbyholes of the gay world, and he seemed to have a perfect ear for the patter of the come-on, the stoned soliloquy, the desperate improvisations of the closing-hour sex hunt, the lies of the insecure and the lame excuses of the walking wounded. The cipher-like nature of the narrator, whose sexual code excludes reciprocity, displays of affection and indeed any acknowledgment of being homosexual, works perfectly in the context of a long and far-reaching report on a world little known by outsiders in 1963. The book’s extreme accuracy must also have made it very handy to many young men in small-town America planning to leave home.

“City of Night” was a knowing book, though not really a hip one. The narrator was not an insider but a sort of rancid Candide getting wised up by people he couldn’t connect with; the book, at times, reads like a long lament for the lost innocence of childhood, and Rechy’s hustler is continually “drawn back” to a gay world he experiences as a degradation, like somebody fighting a narcotics addiction. There is, throughout, the guilty Catholic’s fear of damnation and a yearning to be saved.

Rechy has written many books since “City of Night” and, though it wouldn’t be fair to characterize them all in the same way, the prototype of his ur-hustler has taken center stage in many of them, under different names, piping a continuous aria of mi-mi-mi. In “City of Night,” this character’s uninvolvement with the world around him kept him usefully offstage, with the spotlight focused on the grotesqueries who swam into his ken. In later books, we become much more familiar than we ever wanted to with Johnny Rio and similar characters, whose incessant physical preening, terror of aging, sexual voraciousness and detachment, along with a plangent, potted back-story (sad Texas childhood, stint in the Army, et cetera) form a fairly unappetizing thematic and corporeal package, haunted by Catholicism in a way that seems less metaphysical than self-dramatizing. If there is anything more boring, at this late date, than other people’s sex acts, it’s other people’s workout routines and religious hang-ups.

Each of Rechy’s later books lacks some vital ingredient of his robust early talent; this is puzzling, because what he does well in one book he does badly in the next, and vice versa. The style has become ever more conventional, though this isn’t really the problem. He often writes beautiful sentences--a rare skill--and can make objects, rooms and landscapes vibrate with life. The formal architecture of his novels is adventurous. But with a few exceptions--”Numbers,” his second novel, the “documentary” “The Sexual Outlaw” and “The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez,” his ninth novel--Rechy’s method of storytelling and delineating characters has erratically drifted away from literary verisimilitude, with the result that large chunks of his books resemble the middle-to-lowbrow fictions of a Jackie Collins, full of unbelievable dialogue, clunkily over-staged “conflict,” ridiculous cliffhanger cutaways and an overall falsity made even more fake by the piling on of religious symbols. Even Rechy’s brilliant descriptive gifts, deployed in the context of weakly dramatized incident, begin to read like the dense verbal encrustations of a Cornell Woolrich, giving rich surfaces to narratives that are patently unreal. It doesn’t help that Rechy names his characters the way some people name their dogs or parrots--”Endore,” “Joja,” “Bravo,” “Boo” and the like.

These characters too often have hardly any dimension, being mainly defined by their physical appearances--indescribably “beautiful” if they’re young, distinguishable only by height, hair color, muscle density and the exact nature of their sexual wishes. If they’re old, fat or plain, they’re “trolls.” Both types lack the kind of interiority a fictional character needs for the reader to care about his or her fate. Unless they’re prostitutes, we almost never learn what sort of work they do, where they come from or what they think about, apart from getting laid. The perfunctory information Rechy occasionally provides about such matters is unconvincing.

“The Coming of the Night,” Rechy’s latest novel, has the panoramic ambition and episodic structure of his earlier “Bodies and Souls.” It follows, over the course of one day and night, events in the lives of many characters in Los Angeles. Too many: By the time Rechy has introduced them all, the opportunity to give this novel any real momentum has been blown. The reader warily realizes that Rechy will move each laborious subplot along inch by inch, in unvarying order, and that the scattered action will thread together in an easily foreseen Climax. Virtually all the characters will be drawn, in fact, to the same location by Fate and Coincidence, after almost subliminally crisscrossing each other’s paths throughout the day and evening.

Some subplots work better than others. The story of Father Norris, a priest searching for a particular Mexican hustler named Angel who has a naked Jesus tattooed on his back, has a daft charm (though the naked Jesus tattoo already appeared on somebody’s front in “Bodies and Souls”): The hustlers he approaches, used to gratifying other people’s fantasies, all readily answer to the name “Angel.” A past-50 homosexual named Thomas Watkins spins an elaborate, smarmy fantasy about a boy who lives down the road from his house, believing that the youth waves a bashful greeting each time Thomas drives by, when he’s actually giving him the finger. The climax of the Thomas Watkins story has something akin to the nasty horror at the end of Thomas Mann’s “Little Herr Friedemann”; it demonstrates that Rechy can sometimes squeeze out powerful effects, even from cartoonishly sketched situations.

The meat of Rechy’s sprawling tale isn’t so fresh. In order to have a prodigious number of dizzyingly hunky youngsters of various “beautiful” types converge on the busy rectum of Jesse, a 22-year-old “bottom,” in the midnight hour “to celebrate one glorious year of being gay,” Rechy drags us along as numerous soon-to-be-gangbanging bodybuilders, barflies and one cute-as-a-button porn star (based on the late Joey Stefano) suck and screw the day away, the Joey-alike on the set of “Frontal Assault,” a film being staged around the swimming pool of a Hollywood mogul. The porn movie sequences are emphatically “satirical” and out of tone, though not by much, with the rest of the novel; “Za-Za LaGrande,” an obvious caricature of the transvestite porn director Chi Chi LaRue, comes in for mucho humiliation, primarily because, well, what else? She’s fat.

Set in 1981, this book is full of anachronisms. There was no tranny director working in porn in 1981; at that time the industry, given its particular prejudices, wouldn’t have supported one. “Word,” “all that,” “whatever” and other slang from the ‘90s pepper the dialogue. Although Rechy stages, over and over, the kind of sloppy sexual free-for-all in dark places we’re supposed to associate with “the moment just before AIDS” (vide the jacket copy), his characters are so lacking in consciousness, historical or otherwise, that the only plausible literary reason to place the action back 20 years is that it allows Rechy to endlessly describe anal intercourse without the bother of unwrapping condoms.

There’s an odd disconnection between Rechy’s depiction of ordinary gay men as brainless slaves to their libidos, his disingenuous compassion for the bruised innocence of street hustlers and the compulsive way he inserts utterly pointless scenes of men coupling on virtually every page of this book. The hustlers are entitled to their desires as long as they never acknowledge them; that others desire is a matter for ridicule and an occasion for relentless voyeurism. Rechy casts much of the book in a comedic mode, but his essential Seriousness, his weird insistence that the reader take something as silly as a Jesus tattoo as symbol and metaphor in the midst of so much witless pornography, places “The Coming of the Night” firmly in Jackie Collins territory. Rechy may be more “shocking” to the still-shockable, but Collins is a lot more fun.