Hey, Joe - Hardcover

Neihart, Ben

3.59

100 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684813165 ISBN 13: 9780684813165

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1996

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A gay teenager looking for love in Louisiana stumbles into a conspiracy to tamper with a verdict, in an atmospheric novel about New Orleans nightlife by an up-and-coming writer for The New Yorker. A first novel. 15,000 first printing.

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From Kirkus Reviews:

Two very different narratives crash (and burn) in this breezy first novel set in New Orleans over a single day: A spunky gay teen comes of age and almost collides with the characters in a strange courtroom drama. Sixteen-year-old Joe Keith likes to puff a little weed, hang around the downtown alternative music stores, and cruise older men at the health club. A crypto-slacker, he's also ``making the first moves into being a citizen of the world'' with helpful advice from his older friends: Kel, who runs a music shop; White Donna, a ``faux teen'' deejay; and Black Chris, her Tulane med school student boyfriend. While Joe seems reconciled to his father's death from cancer, his mother Sherry can't let go of father or son, and worries a lot about her smart-tongued boy. Then, improbably, mother and son get drawn into a tale much in the local news: Rae Schipke, a grants administrator, is being sued by the boys of a local orphanage who claim she molested them in their prepubescence. But creepier-than-life Rae has managed to infiltrate the jury with Seth Michaels, a hustler who's done lots of dirty work for her in the past. Seth, however, has a change of heart and votes for Rae's guilt with the rest of the jury. This sends the mad sex pervert on a late-night rampage to Sherry Keith's house. Her presence results from an intercepted phone message on Seth's answering machine: Joe had left his number, hoping to resume some groping he and Seth enjoyed a month or so earlier in the health club. If this seems confusing, it's because events unravel so implausibly here, though Joe does manage to have his first big night of hot sex. The hip patois and up-to-the-minute dance track pulsing in the background can't disguise the clich‚s of young love, nor explain the absurd counterplot. -- Copyright �1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

A novel featuring a teenage protagonist that isn't about sexual abuse, drug addiction, youthful violence or adolescent angst? Unlikely as that may seem, first-novelist Neihart has done it, with charm if not photorealism. His protagonist, Joe Keith, who lives in New Orleans, is openly gay but entirely at ease with it, smokes pot but doesn't have a drug problem, misses his curfew by a few hours but deeply loves his mother. The primary plot line concerns a lawsuit charging sexual abuse, filed by a group of orphans against Rae Schipke, executive director of the charitable foundation that supports their orphanage. Joe is connected only loosely and coincidentally to this main story line, however, and the narrative gains energy and originality when it moves on to the boy's nocturnal wanderings. Over the course of the long night during which the entire novel takes place, Joe meets Welk, a resident (though not sexually abused) of the orphanage, falls in love and loses his virginity. Even more than Joe, Welk is a paragon, a walking dream lover who's more caricature than character-as is Schipke, who comes off as a one-note sociopath. Neihart writes super-hip prose. Though it catches the tone of modern adolescence, it's ultra-fashionableness eventually wears thin-but not so thin as to dilute this spirited novel, which captures the rhythms and pleasures of the Big Easy.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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