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User
A New York City hustler with a special gift for reeling in customers, Apollo, ‘a pale skinned mulatto with a mournful mouth’ strips at a gay sex theatre in Times Square. He is one of the most seductive and disturbing creations in recent American fiction. Unflinchingly describing the lives of hustlers, pimps, drug-addicts and transsexuals in 1990s Times Square, User speaks with the authentic voice of characters from the edge. This is a world filled with stark, hypnotic eroticism and mined with terrors peculiar to the subterranean city in the hours after midnight.
228 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1994
11 people are currently reading
509 people want to read
About the author
Bruce Benderson
48 books47 followersBruce Benderson is a novelist, essayist, journalist, and translator.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
December 6, 2024
First published in 1994, Benderson's milestone novel about the demi-monde of hustlers, ex-cons, junkies, drag queens, and criminals around Times Square does an excellent job bringing its vivid, messy characters to life: It's a book about societal outcasts, but it refrains from pitying the protagonists in a condescending manner and also from romanticizing their lifestyle. It's the intense, lively tone that renders the novel a pageturner, and how it reveals the various dependencies between people who use drugs and each other. In a way, it's also reminiscent of LeBlanc's reportage Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx, which shows how poverty and trauma are inherited over generations.
Benderson's main character Apollo is a male prostitute and junky of mixed ethnic background who spends his time hustling and scoring dope around dive bars, a porno theater and a drag establishment. In a fit of rage, he almost kills Casio, a bouncer and heroin addict. Now Apollo has to hide from the police and Casio's 14-year-old son, a highly intelligent homeless teenager brought up by two out-of-control drug addicts. At the same time, Apollo has to support his own severe heroin habit, which prompts him to ask a HIV-positive gay man for support. All of these characters are rendered in a deep, psychologically convincing manner which makes their decisions, however awful, appear plausible.
I was brought to this novel via Hester's Wrong: A Critical Biography of Dennis Cooper. Cooper is strongly influenced by French literature, especially Arthur Rimbaud and the Marquis de Sade, but also Alain Robbe-Grillet - and Benderson is the translator of Robbe-Grillet, but he has also translated Virginie Despentes. Much like Cooper's works, his writings are underground classics, and in both cases, HIV as a constantly looming death sentence, especially for queer characters, plays an important role, a disease that, in Benderson's case, renders Ivy League graduates into outcasts at the same level as those trying to survive in New York's underbelly.
If you compare Benderson to other authors that come to mind first when thinking about NYC, heroin, and queerness, particularly William S. Burroughs, it becomes apparent that being a well-off Columbia kid deciding to explore the underworld, which applies in a similar manner to many Beat writers, is a completely different act than being born into poverty, addiction and abuse, which is the center of Benderson's storytelling and LeBlanc's journalism.
This text is profoundly sad, entropic, and suffocating, but also intense and vivid. Great character depictions, excellent literature.
Benderson's main character Apollo is a male prostitute and junky of mixed ethnic background who spends his time hustling and scoring dope around dive bars, a porno theater and a drag establishment. In a fit of rage, he almost kills Casio, a bouncer and heroin addict. Now Apollo has to hide from the police and Casio's 14-year-old son, a highly intelligent homeless teenager brought up by two out-of-control drug addicts. At the same time, Apollo has to support his own severe heroin habit, which prompts him to ask a HIV-positive gay man for support. All of these characters are rendered in a deep, psychologically convincing manner which makes their decisions, however awful, appear plausible.
I was brought to this novel via Hester's Wrong: A Critical Biography of Dennis Cooper. Cooper is strongly influenced by French literature, especially Arthur Rimbaud and the Marquis de Sade, but also Alain Robbe-Grillet - and Benderson is the translator of Robbe-Grillet, but he has also translated Virginie Despentes. Much like Cooper's works, his writings are underground classics, and in both cases, HIV as a constantly looming death sentence, especially for queer characters, plays an important role, a disease that, in Benderson's case, renders Ivy League graduates into outcasts at the same level as those trying to survive in New York's underbelly.
If you compare Benderson to other authors that come to mind first when thinking about NYC, heroin, and queerness, particularly William S. Burroughs, it becomes apparent that being a well-off Columbia kid deciding to explore the underworld, which applies in a similar manner to many Beat writers, is a completely different act than being born into poverty, addiction and abuse, which is the center of Benderson's storytelling and LeBlanc's journalism.
This text is profoundly sad, entropic, and suffocating, but also intense and vivid. Great character depictions, excellent literature.
October 4, 2025
Ignore everything you have ever read, heard or been told about this novel, particularly if it involves drug addicts and Times Square, not because there are no addicts and doesn't take place in Times Square, but because that information is the least important thing about this novel - that reduces this novel to some niche historical category when it is one of the great American novels of the 20th century - perhaps the last great 20th century American novel.
Benderson belongs with Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis as a master story teller who has defined what being American is. 'User' is greater than simply America, this a novel for the ages as he captures the dying gasp of a passing world as New York, and America, transforms and reinvents itself. In 'User' Benderson is, like Victor Hugo in his novels of Paris like Miserables, The Hunchback, etc., is recording, recapturing, preserving and celebrating a people, an era, a way of life that was being driven out of New York and for the same reason as Hugo's characters were forced out of Paris by Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann's, money, power and control (though I can not imagine that Benderson's paean to the underdog will ever be degraded, like Hugo's Miserables, by being drained of every ounce of meaning and purpose and turned into a feel good spectacle for somnolent middle class audiences).
'User' is a great and beautiful novel which, thankfully, will never be drained of life by being on high school syllabuses. Most importantly it is no more a guide to a vanished New York than 'The Great Gatsby' is to the parties in the 1920's. 'User' is a novel about money and power and the relentlessness of Moloch devouring everything and anything superfluous to the exercise of power and the making of money. If ever there was heir to doomed Gatsby it is the doomed Apollo in 'User' - there are no second acts for him and indeed Apollo is a clear a representation of the superfluity of almost everyone in the technological future. When he stands in the New Times Square which has no room for him or any of myriad denizens who built it, he is both a victim and warning of all our futures.
'User' is the heir to 'The Great Gatsby' and its relative obscurity only reinforces the comparison. It took more than a generation for Fitzgerald's tragedy to be seen not as a curious tale of a vanished age but as a tale presaging the future. Apollo's fate echoes Gatsby's not in suicide but in how he is utterly used up and forgotten. 'User' is 'The Great Gatsby' of the 21st century.
Benderson belongs with Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis as a master story teller who has defined what being American is. 'User' is greater than simply America, this a novel for the ages as he captures the dying gasp of a passing world as New York, and America, transforms and reinvents itself. In 'User' Benderson is, like Victor Hugo in his novels of Paris like Miserables, The Hunchback, etc., is recording, recapturing, preserving and celebrating a people, an era, a way of life that was being driven out of New York and for the same reason as Hugo's characters were forced out of Paris by Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann's, money, power and control (though I can not imagine that Benderson's paean to the underdog will ever be degraded, like Hugo's Miserables, by being drained of every ounce of meaning and purpose and turned into a feel good spectacle for somnolent middle class audiences).
'User' is a great and beautiful novel which, thankfully, will never be drained of life by being on high school syllabuses. Most importantly it is no more a guide to a vanished New York than 'The Great Gatsby' is to the parties in the 1920's. 'User' is a novel about money and power and the relentlessness of Moloch devouring everything and anything superfluous to the exercise of power and the making of money. If ever there was heir to doomed Gatsby it is the doomed Apollo in 'User' - there are no second acts for him and indeed Apollo is a clear a representation of the superfluity of almost everyone in the technological future. When he stands in the New Times Square which has no room for him or any of myriad denizens who built it, he is both a victim and warning of all our futures.
'User' is the heir to 'The Great Gatsby' and its relative obscurity only reinforces the comparison. It took more than a generation for Fitzgerald's tragedy to be seen not as a curious tale of a vanished age but as a tale presaging the future. Apollo's fate echoes Gatsby's not in suicide but in how he is utterly used up and forgotten. 'User' is 'The Great Gatsby' of the 21st century.
August 3, 2010
Bruce Benderson is onto himself. That's what makes him smarter and more attractive as an author than many others. I picked this up after reading his non-fiction book "The Romanian" which I like better than this novel so far. His voice is aggressive and gooey, the stuff of gay sex clubs and hypodermic crime in the 90's in New York. In that way, his book is like a cozy dear friend from that era when needles and junk were served up with Nirvana and vintage lace slips. His novel reminds me of other well known confrontational queer male writers of the time, like David Wojnarowitz. Still, there are sentences that are sublime. That's probably why he's with Plume.
August 4, 2023
This is a TRUE MODERN CLASSIC in EVERY SENSE of the word, BRILLIANTLY UNPUTDOWNABLE ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️I will now hunt down every other book written by this iconic writer❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
June 24, 2024
Great to see this back in print.
October 24, 2023
File under: Incredible books you wish were written by someone else
October 20, 2021
This book centres around hustlers, queers, trans people, heroin addicts and HIV patients, living and surviving in and around Time Square in the early nineties as a wave of gentrification comes to displace them all. I have always been fascinated by the history of Time Square. I went there a couple of years ago having read a lot of David Wojnarowicz and found it almost impossible to square the very queer, seedy place Wojnarowicz described in his diaries with the mainstream tourist trap of today.
I think Bruce Benderson does a good job at bringing 90s Time Square to life in 'User' as well as giving his characters depth, not glossing over desperate circumstances but not writing trauma porn either. The violence, drug use, etc is un-sentimentalised and this I think is a strength. Benderson being a cis white guy mostly writing POC characters (at least in 'User'), many of whom are also trans, did throw up some questions for me when I started reading, but whilst I am probably not best placed to judge the authenticity of his characters I do think they seem well crafted, rather than one dimensional tropes (which the blurb kind of implies). The character journeys are not happy ones but I found them deeply compelling, and the way Benderson so artfully renders the changing landscape of Time Square had me gripped.
I would like to have met Apollo's new age mum, she sounds like an interesting character, but overall I found 'User' a powerful read. As others have said Benderson's sentence construction is excellent and his voice reminds me of David Wojnarowicz, always a plus.
I think Bruce Benderson does a good job at bringing 90s Time Square to life in 'User' as well as giving his characters depth, not glossing over desperate circumstances but not writing trauma porn either. The violence, drug use, etc is un-sentimentalised and this I think is a strength. Benderson being a cis white guy mostly writing POC characters (at least in 'User'), many of whom are also trans, did throw up some questions for me when I started reading, but whilst I am probably not best placed to judge the authenticity of his characters I do think they seem well crafted, rather than one dimensional tropes (which the blurb kind of implies). The character journeys are not happy ones but I found them deeply compelling, and the way Benderson so artfully renders the changing landscape of Time Square had me gripped.
I would like to have met Apollo's new age mum, she sounds like an interesting character, but overall I found 'User' a powerful read. As others have said Benderson's sentence construction is excellent and his voice reminds me of David Wojnarowicz, always a plus.
December 9, 2023
A true masterpiece. So poetic and raw. Yes, as the name suggests, it does reference a lot of drug taking and sex, but beneath the crude and crass facade is a story that is of a zeitgeist, and yet transcendental. A story that puts crack on a pedestal, with the reader at first thinking it's a glorification, but between the lines is sadness. Pain. And the awful feeling of not being able to do anything about it.
March 20, 2009
I've known a fair amount of junkies in my life. I was even married to one once.
All of them considered themselves artists of one sort or another, and all of them produced work related to their addiction.
All of them were better than this.
All of them considered themselves artists of one sort or another, and all of them produced work related to their addiction.
All of them were better than this.
September 15, 2023
It's so bleak, just so so bleak. Paired well with the Piccadilly Line. Hit a bit close to home in some parts which drew me in more.
February 9, 2025
3,5 rounding up
"The ailing bill had stood no chance because it was part of the short circuit that made up his world. The cash register at Tina's After-hours was full of similar currency that was worn, cellophane-taped or velvety with grime. The same bills passed from johns to hustlers to dealers to bartenders and back to johns over and over. That was how hermetic his world of users was."
In User, set in New York around Times Square during the 90's before what the author himself calls the disneyfication of Times Square, we meet individuals at the very edge of society: hustlers, pimps, dragqueens, drugaddicts, the diseased and homeless. Together they form a world of different kinds of users ranging from johns using hustlers for sex, pimps using them both for money to the hustlers using the johns for financing of their drug use. Benderson brings these shunned voices to the forefront with a really interesting and refreshing mix of narrative perspectives including an all knowing narrator and the stream of consciousness and inner monologue of different characters while they go about their lives as well as these characters' sort of acknowledgment of the narration going on at times and their offerings of extra information between the all knowing narrator's lines, as if in conversation with this out of the story-voice.
Initially I had a little bit of a hard time getting into Benderson's style of writing, which affected the flow of my reading. After a while, however, I managed to get into it more and more. After having finished the book one of my favourite things about it is the different perspectives offered, both when it came to the narration and the characters that made up this whole world. The setting and the characters are what intrigued me to begin with and also what kept me reading, however I must admit I wasn't necessarily carried away by the plot. It started off well and picked up pace from the get go then somewhere in the middle it lost me a little. I would still recommend this book, though.
"The ailing bill had stood no chance because it was part of the short circuit that made up his world. The cash register at Tina's After-hours was full of similar currency that was worn, cellophane-taped or velvety with grime. The same bills passed from johns to hustlers to dealers to bartenders and back to johns over and over. That was how hermetic his world of users was."
In User, set in New York around Times Square during the 90's before what the author himself calls the disneyfication of Times Square, we meet individuals at the very edge of society: hustlers, pimps, dragqueens, drugaddicts, the diseased and homeless. Together they form a world of different kinds of users ranging from johns using hustlers for sex, pimps using them both for money to the hustlers using the johns for financing of their drug use. Benderson brings these shunned voices to the forefront with a really interesting and refreshing mix of narrative perspectives including an all knowing narrator and the stream of consciousness and inner monologue of different characters while they go about their lives as well as these characters' sort of acknowledgment of the narration going on at times and their offerings of extra information between the all knowing narrator's lines, as if in conversation with this out of the story-voice.
Initially I had a little bit of a hard time getting into Benderson's style of writing, which affected the flow of my reading. After a while, however, I managed to get into it more and more. After having finished the book one of my favourite things about it is the different perspectives offered, both when it came to the narration and the characters that made up this whole world. The setting and the characters are what intrigued me to begin with and also what kept me reading, however I must admit I wasn't necessarily carried away by the plot. It started off well and picked up pace from the get go then somewhere in the middle it lost me a little. I would still recommend this book, though.
October 7, 2025
This was an interesting read! I'm not sure if I would want to reread it or if it will particularly stick in my head for a long time, but I'm glad I gave it a shot.
The writing wasn't quite to my taste, but I found the story intriguing enough to continue.
The most surprising fact: I learned a lot about the history of New York and Times Square that I wouldn't have learned otherwise. So kudos for that.
The writing wasn't quite to my taste, but I found the story intriguing enough to continue.
The most surprising fact: I learned a lot about the history of New York and Times Square that I wouldn't have learned otherwise. So kudos for that.
November 2, 2023
This was a contemporary 1994 account of the denizens in the old Times Square, NYC just before gentrification. The narrative is a bit confusing with multiple characters and sometimes you just can't tell always tell who is speaking. However, the book is entertaining and nicely written despite the lack of any characters of redeeming value.
February 9, 2025
Transports you to the exact intended place I believe. A lot of description and really makes you sink in but the storyline sucks, writing style is not the best and not that exciting overall. Good resource if you want to take a first hand stroll through 1980’s opioid crisis New York from a queer perspective (quite eye opening in that way) but doesn’t really go anywhere
June 2, 2019
It’s weird—this book had all the right elements to make me think I’d like it but it never came together for me.
June 1, 2025
"Creatures of the night, what music they make." - Bela Lugosi
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews