After the Blue Hour: A True Fiction
by John Rechy
Grove Press. 212 pages, $25.
ALTHOUGH IT’S HARD to imagine John Rechy as a male ingénue, this is the role he assigns himself in his latest novel. Set in 1960—three years before the publication of City of Night made him famous—Rechy’s new novel is described on the title page as “A True Fiction.” This could describe many of his first-person narratives, which take readers into the mid-20th-century world of sexual outlaws: hustlers, drag queens, men seeking sex in city parks and rented rooms. Rechy not only wrote about but inhabited this world as a man compulsively pursuing impersonal sexual encounters. An unnamed version of John Rechy describing these intimate experiences is the narrator of many of his novels.
In After the Blue Hour, the narrator bears the name of the author himself. A preface informs us that the 24-year-old John Rechy has received a letter, forwarded by his publisher, from a man who admires two short stories recently published in magazines, and extends an invitation to spend the summer with him on his private island. Once a plane ticket arrives, he accepts the invitation, wondering if this man, who would have seen a picture of the ruggedly handsome author that appeared in one of the magazines, is interested in more than his writing.
When John meets his host, Paul, in a crowded airport, he sizes him up to determine which of them has the physical, and possibly the sexual, upper hand. John guesses Paul is in his late thirties, a tall, handsome, deeply tanned man with a slender, well-toned body. John is more muscular and confident that he can catch up with the tan. Paul wears the casual clothes of a wealthy man; John is dressed in Levi’s, a tight shirt, and short boots. John relaxes. Their bodies and styles of dress are sufficiently different to mean they’re not competing in these areas. As the plot of After the Blue Hour unfolds, Rechy recounts the gradual erosion of John’s self-confidence and his belief that he and Paul are equally matched.
This is a good point to state that the character “John Rechy” is just that, a character, and that the author is shaping this narrative as a work of the imagination, no matter how much it may have been inspired by some incident in his early life. In fact, Rechy relies on one of the most literary of all genres to tell his story, the gothic novel.
Anyhow, Paul takes John to a lush, green island with a large house on a lake. On the way, John notices another island, gray and shadowy, that “looked neglected, left to die.” When asked about this island, Paul makes a passing reference to the “flames of evil” but declines to tell John what happened there. When they arrive at the house, they are met by Sonya, Paul’s beautiful young companion, and Stanty, his fourteen-year-old son. The four of them will spend the summer together, attended by two mysterious servants, a man and a woman who remain in the background and never speak. The two men spend most of their time together talking: about Paul’s life with his two former wives, about books, and about influences on John’s writing. In his persona as a street hustler, John emphasized a “strained masculinity” and hid his intelligence and education, so at first he enjoys displaying his knowledge of writing, film, music, and art.
John forms a more personal connection with Sonya, finding her attractive and, like himself, vulnerable to being possessed by men with money and power. Stanty, on the other hand, has an uncanny ability to expose John’s weaknesses, especially those connected with his Chicano heritage and his impoverished childhood. John quickly comes to dislike the boy. In Stanty, Rechy creates a memorable portrait of a beautiful but evil child. The nature of evil, how people can take part in horrendous events and then ignore them, is the major theme of After the Blue Hour. John recognizes the evil in Stanty almost from the beginning. His illusions about Paul and Sonya last longer because the three become engaged in an extended erotic flirtation that culminates in a startling scene of sexual degradation near the end of the novel.
John’s flirtation with Sonya is more about friendship than sex. He tells her his “love affairs” with women have never included sex but have resulted in his most lasting relationships. John is less in control of his flirtation with Paul. The older man dominates their conversations, which usually take place as the two lie side-by-side sunbathing in swim trunks. John is overwhelmingly aware of Paul’s body, especially his large “endowment,” which is in evidence whenever he violently kisses Sonya or describes his sexual conquests of women. Although Paul’s mistreatment of women shocks John, he’s unable to stop listening to this man who hustled his way to wealth. John had always believed his own hustling had the essential integrity of two men being honest about what they were seeking. Under the demonic influence of Paul, who wants to seduce John in both body and mind, he begins to question this ethos.
The gothic elements of the novel—the unrelenting heat, the mysterious servants, rumors about the nearby island—are a bit forced at times. Still, this genre serves Rechy well as he explores the question of evil in After the Blue Hour. Although he abandoned the Catholicism of his childhood, at heart he has always been a very moral writer. He knows the world is not innocent, and he knows the lure of the erotic. But he also knows that facing the consequences of their behavior gives people an integrity that keeps the forces of true evil in check. Fifty-four years after Rechy wrestled with these same matters in City of Night, it’s splendid to have another of his masterful novels.
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Daniel Burr, who lives in Covington, Kentucky, is a frequent contributor to this magazine.
