Call Me: A Novel

by P-P Hartnett

Overview

When Liam decides to begin answering the personal ads of London's gay papers, he is at first bemused and fascinated. After all, it is simply a way to entertain himself and pass the time.

What Liam doesn't bargain for, however, is his growing reliance on the ads and the men who answer them. What at first was a form of distraction is quickly becoming an obsession, and Liam is discovering just who finds him so alluring.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312180638
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	12/15/1997
Series:	Stonewall Inn Editions Series
Edition description:	1ST STONEW
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.44(d)

About the Author

P-P Hartnett is the author of Call Me.

Editorial Reviews

After his lover dies, Liam embarks upon a quest to end his solitary and empty life. Placing an ad in numerous gay London newspapers and magazines, he sits back and waits for responses, which are abundant. The result is a sexually explicit story line featuring page after page of letters and sexual liaisons with a host of characters too numerous to mention. Liam at first seems selective and slightly compassionate to the many lonely men and women who want his company. However, he makes an about-face in the last chapters, becoming cruel and sadistic to just about everyone he meets. Although the reader realizes that Liam is just a little bit unstable as he offers memories of an abusive father and an awful childhood, it's hard to feel much empathy for him. This tale of a dark side of gay life is better suited to the pages of underground gay magazines and newspapers mainly because of the format the author uses, complete with a glossary of terms for the ads. Hartnett has a way with words but in this case needs a plot and a more sympathetic character. Not recommended.Shirley Gibson Coleman, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., Mich.

Library Journal

A graphic, ghoulish depiction of the more outr‚ aspects of gay sex, as a young London photographer masks his grief over losing his lover to AIDS by throwing himself into the world of personal ads, with grim results. First advertising himself as Bike Boy (black Lycra shorts, pumping thighs, butt in the airyou get the picture), Liam is able to fend off his sad thoughts of Ray by reviewing the flood of mail spawned by his ad. Ensuing contacts include a teenage cyclist, a wealthy Asian, and a professional closeted in the north of England; some of the encounters pass quickly from chat to business. These couplings only whet Liam's appetite, however, and soon he is himself responding to ads across the spectrum, from S&M games to groups. Bounced from being one man's doggie to being bathed and shaved by a trio of curious women; ever on the make with new respondents; continually harassed by the upcountry closet number, who proves to be a dangerous nut-case as well, Liam never stops for long, even though he's aware that his obsession is dragging him into depths where he no longer recognizes himself. Just when his self-degradation seems complete, capped by a brutish visit to Hampstead Heath, notorious as a place for violent trysts, he has another phone calland learns that his hated father has died. While this is the answer to Liam's prayers, it's also another way to lose his bearings, and he responds by sinking even further into the muck his life has become. Not for the squeamish, as they say: a debut novel that's more precise than a pathologist's report (complete with a glossary of terms) and a whole lot more vivid, but even so an eye- opening view of the devastating, horrific effect ofloss.

Kirkus Reviews