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Hey, Joe
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.
Hardcover
First published September 1, 1997
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
January 4, 2025
Part thriller, part bildungsroman, part gritty love letter to New Orleans, Hey, Joe tries to be many things and doesn't really succeed in being any of them.
Joe, the main character, is a lonely, horny and rather lost 16 year old, who will seemingly respond to anyone who will take notice of him. Hey, Joe, indeed! He is a blank slate with very little depth (all the characters are rather two-dimensional enigmas or cyphers) in a magical version of the world where homophobia seemingly doesn't exist.
This is perfectly summed up by that sentence in the last couple of page of the book: "There was an empty space where his insides had been - room for anyone, anything, to come fill him up."
There is much that could be interesting in the premise of the book but those themes are never properly explored and the thriller element is wholly unbelievable.
Neihart's is an odd use of language. He uses a lot of slang (and not only during dialogues) but that somehow isn't convincing.
A missed opportunity.
Joe, the main character, is a lonely, horny and rather lost 16 year old, who will seemingly respond to anyone who will take notice of him. Hey, Joe, indeed! He is a blank slate with very little depth (all the characters are rather two-dimensional enigmas or cyphers) in a magical version of the world where homophobia seemingly doesn't exist.
This is perfectly summed up by that sentence in the last couple of page of the book: "There was an empty space where his insides had been - room for anyone, anything, to come fill him up."
There is much that could be interesting in the premise of the book but those themes are never properly explored and the thriller element is wholly unbelievable.
Neihart's is an odd use of language. He uses a lot of slang (and not only during dialogues) but that somehow isn't convincing.
A missed opportunity.
July 12, 2015
I just thought about this book for some reason today, and I realized I hadn't added it to my bookshelf. Hey, Joe is one of my very favorite gay YA books and probably the very first that I read. I can't believe I forgot about it, but it has been well over ten years since I read it.
What I recall finding so exciting about Hey, Joe is the author's handling of contemporary gay teen issues; not just the family and peer acceptance stuff, but also the figuring out where one fits in the world as a post-Stonewall gay young man. Really, it was sort of a "sleeper" novel that received some critical acclaim, but was perhaps a little ahead of its time. Some years later in the new millennium, authors like Alex Sanchez, David Levithan, and Peter Cameron achieved a lot more mass market success writing contemporary YA in the same realistic, matter-of-fact vein.
What I recall finding so exciting about Hey, Joe is the author's handling of contemporary gay teen issues; not just the family and peer acceptance stuff, but also the figuring out where one fits in the world as a post-Stonewall gay young man. Really, it was sort of a "sleeper" novel that received some critical acclaim, but was perhaps a little ahead of its time. Some years later in the new millennium, authors like Alex Sanchez, David Levithan, and Peter Cameron achieved a lot more mass market success writing contemporary YA in the same realistic, matter-of-fact vein.
July 4, 2025
This is a difficult book to rate and review because I loved parts of it but, it is the proverbial 'curates egg' which is very good in parts but bad in others and those two parts, whatever their individual qualities, don't come together to make a satisfactory whole. I have given it four stars because there were parts I really enjoyed but I am probably being over generous because as, or if, you read further you will see that I have many reservations and criticisms.
First things first, this novel is described by many reviewers as a YA novel. It isn't but I am not going to explain why now, go to the end of this review and find my explanation there.
The novel is described as coming-of-age, and I have shelved it as a bildungsroman, but in the course of barely 24 hours Joe Keith, the just-turned-sixteen Joe of the title, barely has time to come-of-age (he does lose his virginity but that isn't the end of coming-of-age, it isn't even the beginning of coming-of-age, and is nowhere along the bildungsroman tradition of gaining-wisdom). In fact Joe doesn't change and he doesn't encounter any adult events or challenges (indeed the novel actually ends just at the point where Joe would have to face adult challenges). Other reviewers have felt that Joe is a blank slate with very little depth. But what 16 year old middle class boy growing up in a prosperous suburb with his own credit card is anything more than a blank slate? Even Denis Cooper who has written better and deeper about lost teenage boys admitted in his novel 'Period' that boys like Joe are nothing, only possibility or potential.
That doesn't mean that young protagonists or a limited time frame cannot produce something powerful and true. As an example I would mention 'Life in the Land of the Living' by Daniel Vilmure. But then the two young brothers in Vilmure's novel are on the gritty streets of a dying city, lost, abandoned and without hope. They have only each other, no credit cards. The days when middle class white boys like Joe Keith were at the centre of the zeitgeist have long gone (read the story 'Young Hemingways' in 'Briefly Told Lives' by C. Bard Cole for a sharp and funny dissection of this change).
But that doesn't mean that Joe Keith is not delightfully funny and amusing. He is all potential, and that is youths charm. That he doesn't realise what a cocoon of safety he is living in is not his fault. Growing up shouldn't be a challenge. But that Ben Neihart, as an author, doesn't seem to suspect or sense that his 'love song' to New Orleans is more a love song to a tourist board cliche than to the real New Orleans (even in 1997). Certainly the New Orleans that suffered in Hurricane Katrina is not present in this novel.
Believe it or not these are some of the best things I have to say about the novel. What I disliked was 1.) the clumsy juxtaposition of two wildly different story lines and 2.) the obsessive use of cultural,slang and brand name identifiers.
The brand names and slang are far less new or exciting then they, probably, appeared thirty years ago; but then even that sine qua non of the brand name as metaphor novel 'American Psycho' is not wearing as well or reading as excitingly as reviewers at the time thought it would. The problem is not with finding a metaphor in 'consumerism', Emile Zola did that in 'Au Bonheur des Dames' (The Ladies' Delight) published in 1883. But he didn't fill his novel with brand names. As for the slang? In many ways it reads almost offensive now, that middle class white adoption, or theft, of black cultural modes of expression and look (do white boys still wear dreadlocks? I hope not) is deeply problematic. Even more so when it is a white suburban boy appropriating the culture of the people and city he doesn't know or acknowledge. Probably because the author doesn't know it exists.
Structural the tale of Joe's, slight walk-on-the-wild side, is joined to a tale of grand guignol New Orleans corruption involving law-enforcement, big-money foundations, child-abuse, etc. etc. To link these two tales Mr. Neihart drops enough 'McGuffins' for a dozen Hitchcock films and by the end one can't help calling them coincidences. That the 'bad' guys are as simplistically drawn as Joe is less acceptable. They are no longer 'potential' but real, they have made the decisions and choices that banish that adolescent state even if they retain a gym toned body. If this second tale, the dark side tale, was something that Joe himself encountered on his trip to New Orleans then it might have served some purpose. But it only connects with Joe through his mother, by one of those many McGuffins, and we never actually see Joe confronts, so he never learns, as far as we learn from the novel, how his actions, however peripherally, have led to a nightmare for his only parent.
Possibly Joe never makes this discovery because it would required him to be more then a sexual active Peter Pan.
The pity is that Ben Neihart can write, or maybe he is an example of the problem of 'learning' how to write via a 'creative writing' course. In the end the freshly 'trained' author discovers that he has the technical ability but has nothing to say because he hasn't lived. I am not sure if this is Ben Neihart's story but it is instructive that after one more novel he gave up writing fiction.
Why This Is Not A YA Novel:
Because it was not written specifically for YA, the New Yorker doesn't run excerpts from, nor review, YA novels. This is a novel about a YA, but then so was 'The Sorrows of Young Werther' and 'A Sentimental Education' and 'Lord of the Flies'. They were not written for YA and neither were 'Gullivers Travels', 'Tom Sawyer', 'Huckleberry Finn' or 'Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea' written as books for children or YA.
This doesn't mean I don't think YA should not read 'Hey, Joe', they should read it or anything else they want to. In this day and age should we stop anyone from reading?
My point is that YA books, as I understand them, are books written, not so much for YA, but for those in schools and libraries who buy books for YA. Which means books that they can defend and which have been written with the aim of not upsetting those who like to be upset. Authors of these sorts of YA novels don't show YA using 'bad' language or in situations, relationships or doing things, they don't want YA doing. These people don't want swear words, or behavior, that they deem 'inappropriate'. On those grounds alone 'Hey, Joe' breaks just about every possible taboo. This book would not get into any High School library in Florida or Texas.
First things first, this novel is described by many reviewers as a YA novel. It isn't but I am not going to explain why now, go to the end of this review and find my explanation there.
The novel is described as coming-of-age, and I have shelved it as a bildungsroman, but in the course of barely 24 hours Joe Keith, the just-turned-sixteen Joe of the title, barely has time to come-of-age (he does lose his virginity but that isn't the end of coming-of-age, it isn't even the beginning of coming-of-age, and is nowhere along the bildungsroman tradition of gaining-wisdom). In fact Joe doesn't change and he doesn't encounter any adult events or challenges (indeed the novel actually ends just at the point where Joe would have to face adult challenges). Other reviewers have felt that Joe is a blank slate with very little depth. But what 16 year old middle class boy growing up in a prosperous suburb with his own credit card is anything more than a blank slate? Even Denis Cooper who has written better and deeper about lost teenage boys admitted in his novel 'Period' that boys like Joe are nothing, only possibility or potential.
That doesn't mean that young protagonists or a limited time frame cannot produce something powerful and true. As an example I would mention 'Life in the Land of the Living' by Daniel Vilmure. But then the two young brothers in Vilmure's novel are on the gritty streets of a dying city, lost, abandoned and without hope. They have only each other, no credit cards. The days when middle class white boys like Joe Keith were at the centre of the zeitgeist have long gone (read the story 'Young Hemingways' in 'Briefly Told Lives' by C. Bard Cole for a sharp and funny dissection of this change).
But that doesn't mean that Joe Keith is not delightfully funny and amusing. He is all potential, and that is youths charm. That he doesn't realise what a cocoon of safety he is living in is not his fault. Growing up shouldn't be a challenge. But that Ben Neihart, as an author, doesn't seem to suspect or sense that his 'love song' to New Orleans is more a love song to a tourist board cliche than to the real New Orleans (even in 1997). Certainly the New Orleans that suffered in Hurricane Katrina is not present in this novel.
Believe it or not these are some of the best things I have to say about the novel. What I disliked was 1.) the clumsy juxtaposition of two wildly different story lines and 2.) the obsessive use of cultural,slang and brand name identifiers.
The brand names and slang are far less new or exciting then they, probably, appeared thirty years ago; but then even that sine qua non of the brand name as metaphor novel 'American Psycho' is not wearing as well or reading as excitingly as reviewers at the time thought it would. The problem is not with finding a metaphor in 'consumerism', Emile Zola did that in 'Au Bonheur des Dames' (The Ladies' Delight) published in 1883. But he didn't fill his novel with brand names. As for the slang? In many ways it reads almost offensive now, that middle class white adoption, or theft, of black cultural modes of expression and look (do white boys still wear dreadlocks? I hope not) is deeply problematic. Even more so when it is a white suburban boy appropriating the culture of the people and city he doesn't know or acknowledge. Probably because the author doesn't know it exists.
Structural the tale of Joe's, slight walk-on-the-wild side, is joined to a tale of grand guignol New Orleans corruption involving law-enforcement, big-money foundations, child-abuse, etc. etc. To link these two tales Mr. Neihart drops enough 'McGuffins' for a dozen Hitchcock films and by the end one can't help calling them coincidences. That the 'bad' guys are as simplistically drawn as Joe is less acceptable. They are no longer 'potential' but real, they have made the decisions and choices that banish that adolescent state even if they retain a gym toned body. If this second tale, the dark side tale, was something that Joe himself encountered on his trip to New Orleans then it might have served some purpose. But it only connects with Joe through his mother, by one of those many McGuffins, and we never actually see Joe confronts, so he never learns, as far as we learn from the novel, how his actions, however peripherally, have led to a nightmare for his only parent.
Possibly Joe never makes this discovery because it would required him to be more then a sexual active Peter Pan.
The pity is that Ben Neihart can write, or maybe he is an example of the problem of 'learning' how to write via a 'creative writing' course. In the end the freshly 'trained' author discovers that he has the technical ability but has nothing to say because he hasn't lived. I am not sure if this is Ben Neihart's story but it is instructive that after one more novel he gave up writing fiction.
Why This Is Not A YA Novel:
Because it was not written specifically for YA, the New Yorker doesn't run excerpts from, nor review, YA novels. This is a novel about a YA, but then so was 'The Sorrows of Young Werther' and 'A Sentimental Education' and 'Lord of the Flies'. They were not written for YA and neither were 'Gullivers Travels', 'Tom Sawyer', 'Huckleberry Finn' or 'Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea' written as books for children or YA.
This doesn't mean I don't think YA should not read 'Hey, Joe', they should read it or anything else they want to. In this day and age should we stop anyone from reading?
My point is that YA books, as I understand them, are books written, not so much for YA, but for those in schools and libraries who buy books for YA. Which means books that they can defend and which have been written with the aim of not upsetting those who like to be upset. Authors of these sorts of YA novels don't show YA using 'bad' language or in situations, relationships or doing things, they don't want YA doing. These people don't want swear words, or behavior, that they deem 'inappropriate'. On those grounds alone 'Hey, Joe' breaks just about every possible taboo. This book would not get into any High School library in Florida or Texas.
January 29, 2023
Funky & intriguing
June 26, 2009
I read this so long ago I can barely remember a single detail, other than it drove me along to read the whole thing in one sitting. Lovely cover artwork encapsulates the feeling of the book. I can't express how much admiration I feel towards a publisher who is willing to pair artwork so well with the story. Entice every sense, except smell. I'd hate a scratch and sniff book, let it be said.
August 15, 2007
Great love song to youth and New Orleans. A fun ride on a steamy Southern night with Joe, a young teenager who is on the cusp of becoming something pretty great--himself. (Also: a quick read...)
August 15, 2007
This was the first gay book that I ever read, years before I started to come out. It made me feel connected to a world of possibilities...I should read it again!
June 26, 2009
I'm rating this book twice because both covers were great. How rare is it to have a different paperback cover that works as well as the hardcover? Rare, I think. I mean, very.
March 23, 2015
Nice little book, nice mood, good sense of place and time. Young gay boy coming of age in New Orleans. Enjoyable.
March 4, 2017
I should read this again. I remember really liking it, the characters, and really being able to relate to all of them/their experiences, even though they were quite drastically different from my own.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews