User: 2a Novel

Benderson's second novel (after Pretending to Say No ) plunges the reader into a wretched, liminal community of transexual hustlers, street people, debased cops and bohemian junkies congregating in and around New York City's Time Square. Careening through the center of Benderson's multilayerd story is Apollo, a wired, hypermasculine prostitute of mixed racial descent who, in a fit of existential rage, nearly kills Casio, the bouncer at a porno theater. Dogged by the police, stalked by Baby Pop, Casio's vengeful son, and possessed by an unrelenting drug habit, Apollo moves through a lurid Baudelairian demimonde of numbed souls orbiting around fly-by-night transvestite clubs and after-hours bars. Benderson's New York is a multicultural city of the damned populated by extraordinary characters: Baby Pop, the gifted son of two junkies who sleeps in an abandoned train in the tunnels underneath Grand Central Station clutching an algebra book and a Steven King novel; Abuela, Casio's superstitious Latino great-grandmother; Apollo's unnamed, ``once preppy,'' HIV-infected friend and patron, who hovers at the seedy margins of the city preparing his ``death diary.'' Benderson's supple and polyglot prose gives voice to a discordant chorus of characters; although the plot is fragmentary and the ending abrupt, he invests their oppressed lives with profound authenticity and horror. (Aug.)