Review - Body For Rent

Tim isn’t very happy with his life. He has a degree in counseling, but he makes better money working a dead-end job in a furniture factory. He also feels stifled in his relationship with his current girlfriend. Tim has known since he was a young boy that he was attracted to other men, but he has repressed those feelings and tried to conform to other people’s expectations of him.

One night, Tim talks himself into visiting a gay bar, where he meets Troy, the owner of a male escort agency. Troy seems to think Tim might have a future as a prostitute. Despite many misgivings, Tim starts to live a double life. There’s the ‘straight’ Tim his roommates always knew, and then there’s Ben, the gay hooker.

“Body For Rent” follows Tim as he discovers new things about himself, and what he is capable of. The story is told directly by Tim, as a sort of memoir as he looks back at the path that led him to the turning point which the book opens with. It’s a somewhat bittersweet tale, based on the author’s interviews with several male prostitutes. Some might choose to see it as a cautionary tale, with many tragic moments, but it’s more of an honest look at a job about which there is a lot of misconceptions, both good and bad. Many of the tragic moments that affect Tim and his coworkers have nothing to do with their occupation. They’re just part of most lives.

The writing is generally good, but the book suffers a little from that bane of self-publishing: insufficient editing and proofing. It’s far from the worst I’ve seen, but the frequent missing or extra quote marks made a few passages difficult to read. One other minor annoyance was trying figure out the time and place of the story. It’s not surprising that the author might want to protect his sources by keeping the location of the story vague or non-specific, but it wasn’t even clear in which country the story takes place. The linguistic clues finally added up to Australia, but figuring this out was a minor distraction from the story, and even then there were a few references to London or Manchester that made me doubt that conclusion.

The time of the story was another minor puzzle, or perhaps curiosity would be a better word. The book was published in May of 2012, and there’s nothing in the text to place it in the past, yet Tim listens to cassette tapes in his car, and nobody seems to own a mobile phone through most of the story, which suggests that the story takes place in the 1990s or so. Yet, near the end, Tim suddenly has a mobile, even though only a year or two has passed. As with the location, this creates a distraction as you suddenly realize that the setting of the story isn’t what you may have assumed when you started.

Although the book is listed as erotica on Amazon, there is, perhaps surprisingly, very little sex in the story. If you’re looking for titillation, you won’t find it here. This is more a slice-of-life story where the protagonist just happens to have chosen to be a prostitute. The story is interesting and presented reasonably well, but it didn’t really involve me emotionally, which is why I’ve given it three stars. It’s a good story, but not especially memorable.

“Body For Rent” may be purchased from Amazon