The Boys Across the Street: A Novel

The Boys Across the Street: A Novel

Faber & Faber, 278 pp., $24

Rick Sandford, who died of AIDS in 1995, led a colorful and eventful life: Once a gay porn star under the name Ben Barker, he also worked as a stand-in for television and movie stars, counted novelist Christopher Isherwood as a friend, and claimed to have had sex with thousands of men. The narrator of the novel he left behind is also named Rick Sandford, so it's reasonable to assume that the book is a thinly veiled autobiography, especially when Rick talks repeatedly about the novel he's writing, which is called (you guessed it) The Boys Across the Street. Too bad, then, that the events he recounts here -- his fascination with a bunch of Chassidic Jewish boys who attend the yeshiva across from his apartment -- add up to a pointless, repetitive, dull, and sometimes offensive narrative.

The idea, at least, has potential: A former gay porn daddy strikes up tentative friendships with and develops an obsessive interest in a group of religious, socially insulated Jewish school boys. Could there be a more unlikely -- and fascinating -- collision of two worlds?

But there's a problem: The narrator's voice is flaccid and repetitive. Rick, who spends much of his time out on his apartment stoop with his binoculars, describes his encounters with the boys in prose that reads as if it came from a diary in need of serious editing. Not one of the school boys, who should be crucial elements in this tale, lifts off the page and becomes a three-dimensional individual.

The reader rarely gets a glimpse of Rick away from his apartment setting, where he obsesses over the boys. Other contexts might have helped the reader get a grasp on his character, and perhaps made him appear less stalker-like. Rick even begins reading Jewish theological books and wearing a yarmulke and other Chassidic garb in an attempt to win the boys over. Although he engages them in religious and moral debates, acts in a usually friendly manner, and never makes overt sexual advances toward any of them, Rick still comes across as one of the worst gay stereotypes around -- a sex-crazed pedophile. Case in point, here's Rick talking about the ending of the novel he's writing about the boys: "My ending was that one of you boys would renounce your religion and come over and we'd have great sex."

By turns tasteless, plodding, and borderline racist, the failure of The Boys Across the Street is that it manages to be all of the aforementioned qualities and a boring rant without a compelling plot. Somehow, Sandford accomplishes the unimaginable -- he makes obsession seem boring.