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Arcade
A new world opens up to Sam when, fresh from a breakup, he discovers a XXX peepshow on the outskirts of town. More than a mere venue for closeted men to meet for anonymous sex, it’s an underground subculture populated by regular players, and marked by innumerable coded rules and customs.
A welcome diversion from his dead-end job and the compulsive cyberstalking of the cop who broke his heart, Sam returns to the arcade again and again. When the bizarre setting triggers reflections on his own history and theories, he contemplates his anxious, religious upbringing in small-town Texas, the frightening overlap between horror movies and his love life, and the false expectations created by multiple childhood viewings of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Then, of course, there is the subject of sex.
As his connection to the place strengthens, and his actions both outside and within the peepshow escalate, Sam wavers between dismissing the arcade as a frivolous pastime and accepting it as the most meaningful place in his life. Arcade is a relentlessly candid and graphic account of one man’s attempt to square immutable desire with a carefully constructed self-image on the brink.
A welcome diversion from his dead-end job and the compulsive cyberstalking of the cop who broke his heart, Sam returns to the arcade again and again. When the bizarre setting triggers reflections on his own history and theories, he contemplates his anxious, religious upbringing in small-town Texas, the frightening overlap between horror movies and his love life, and the false expectations created by multiple childhood viewings of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Then, of course, there is the subject of sex.
As his connection to the place strengthens, and his actions both outside and within the peepshow escalate, Sam wavers between dismissing the arcade as a frivolous pastime and accepting it as the most meaningful place in his life. Arcade is a relentlessly candid and graphic account of one man’s attempt to square immutable desire with a carefully constructed self-image on the brink.
222 pages, Paperback
First published June 7, 2016
15 people are currently reading
223 people want to read
About the author
Drew Nellins Smith
1 book13 followersDrew Nellins Smith’s essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in many places in print and online, including The Believer, Tin House, Paste Magazine,The Millions, The Daily Beast, and Electric Literature. He lives in Austin, TX. Arcade is his first novel.
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Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews
May 23, 2016
Some people will probably be repulsed by the narrator of Arcade, a man in his late 20's stuck in a self-destructive spiral. He is gay, but still mostly closeted, and he clings to the two things he loves most: his former lover, the cop, and the Arcade. The Arcade is one of those seedy places with racks of porn DVD's in the front and viewing booths in the back, and the booths are where men in this small Texas town go to cruise. Our narrator is able to think of little else and the book is a chronicle of his experiences.
The Arcade is seedy and dark and dirty and probably dangerous. Our narrator is probably unrecognizable to people who have never found themselves in a deep well of self-destruction and denial. He is lonely and obsessive and doesn't seem to know anything about what he wants (besides the cop, who has moved in with someone new). It's a short novel, a series of scenes, and Smith's prose is simple and frank, while still plumbing depths of character and establishing a strong sense of place.
I have been thinking about the state of the gay novel. This year I read WHAT BELONGS TO YOU and EDINBURGH not long before I read this book and the three seem to fit together to me. It's interesting that while the gay novel has moved past the narratives of HIV and coming out that dominated for so long, it still contains at its heart darkness, sadness, loneliness, and sex. These books are often about obsession and the sides of gay culture and sex that are still outside the mainstream, unacceptable to society. (Greenwell wrote a lovely piece on how cruising made him a poet.) Smith actually about his own experience finding out that Greenwell's novel would be released shortly before his and eventually interviewed Greenwell. As Smith notes, their novels are quite different even though they share something similar at their heart. Smith and Greenwell are very different writers. But I enjoyed them both in a similar way and actually reading them close together enhanced the experience. 2016 is a good year to give us both of these books.
The Arcade is seedy and dark and dirty and probably dangerous. Our narrator is probably unrecognizable to people who have never found themselves in a deep well of self-destruction and denial. He is lonely and obsessive and doesn't seem to know anything about what he wants (besides the cop, who has moved in with someone new). It's a short novel, a series of scenes, and Smith's prose is simple and frank, while still plumbing depths of character and establishing a strong sense of place.
I have been thinking about the state of the gay novel. This year I read WHAT BELONGS TO YOU and EDINBURGH not long before I read this book and the three seem to fit together to me. It's interesting that while the gay novel has moved past the narratives of HIV and coming out that dominated for so long, it still contains at its heart darkness, sadness, loneliness, and sex. These books are often about obsession and the sides of gay culture and sex that are still outside the mainstream, unacceptable to society. (Greenwell wrote a lovely piece on how cruising made him a poet.) Smith actually about his own experience finding out that Greenwell's novel would be released shortly before his and eventually interviewed Greenwell. As Smith notes, their novels are quite different even though they share something similar at their heart. Smith and Greenwell are very different writers. But I enjoyed them both in a similar way and actually reading them close together enhanced the experience. 2016 is a good year to give us both of these books.
July 26, 2016
Arcade manages to succeed where most contemporary American fiction fails, boldly testing the reader's sympathy and patience without the reader questioning the writer's talent or character's emotional worth.
Possibly the best book I will read this year, it had my heart and stomach competing for a place in my throat while my hands struggled to keep both book and moral compass aloft.
Redemption is secondary to an admirably frank confrontation of "right" and "wrong" with a concupiscence that is both startling and surprisingly edifying.
Possibly the best book I will read this year, it had my heart and stomach competing for a place in my throat while my hands struggled to keep both book and moral compass aloft.
Redemption is secondary to an admirably frank confrontation of "right" and "wrong" with a concupiscence that is both startling and surprisingly edifying.
August 15, 2016
As a novel, "Arcade" is an artless, plotless mess; as a thinly disguised memoir, "Arcade" is an act of courage, since Smith creates one of the most pathetic protagonists in the history of literature -- a wimpy closet case who's stalking a former hookup while cruising for anonymous sex in the porn video "arcade" of the title. The nameless narrator displays so few redeeming qualities that the reader is embarrassed to empathize with him, since his neediness, low self-esteem and dishonesty are all familiar, and all hideously embarrassing. If Smith based the character's experiences on his own, I admire him for his brutal honesty, right down to the lowbrow popular culture references which his hero uses to rationalize his own stupidity. Not particularly pleasant or gripping, but it succeeds on its own terms as a character study.
February 6, 2017
I am perennially fascinated by authors who write about unsavoury, unlikeable, or morally ambiguous characters. This requires a considerable buy-in from the reader, especially if the experiences related are totally alien to your world view, and/or antithetical to your values and social mores.
I think the author also has to tread a fine line between the reader’s natural prurience and outright aversion. However, the balance is certainly shifting. Niche books like Samuel R. Delany’s The Mad Man and Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, and the more recent and mainstream Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, deliberately set out to test the reader’s endurance and level of provocation.
Even though South Africa has recognised gay marriage since 2006, the fact that such places as described in Arcade still exist (persist?) here – from Johannesburg to Pretoria and Cape Town – speaks volumes about the level of discrimination simmering out there.
A lot of men who frequent such venues are bisexual, married with children or families, high-level professionals, educators, or celebrities, or have not ‘come out’ as of yet. As Drew Nellins Smith so rightly puts it: “One of the great gifts of the Arcade was the way it put us all on the same level.”
This not only refers to a level playing field, but a level of mutual acceptance and tolerance often lacking in society, the workplace, and even among family, friends, acquaintances, work colleagues (and especially career clients) despite legislative protection and constitutional guarantees.
There is no doubt that the main character of Arcade is pretty unstable. Not only does he eavesdrop on his ex-boyfriend’s email on a daily basis to check out how his ‘replacement’ is doing, known only as the Kid, he also phones said boyfriend on a regular basis to insist that the relationship is actually not over. Being the sane and decent human being he is, the ex does everything in his power to disabuse our protagonist of this notion.
Known only by the pseudonym ‘Sam’, “a name I sometimes used with men”, we are not even sure if our protagonist is ‘gay’ in the generally acceptable definition of the word, that is enjoying sexual relations with men. Whenever he goes to the arcade, he insists he is only there to observe, and not to participate. (These observations are rendered vividly and, surprisingly, with great tenderness and affection, even the smells and the shit and other detritus littering the floors.)
Sam recounts a threesome with a friend and a woman: “While my buddy fucked her that night, I stuck my fingers inside of her and felt his dick sliding along my hand. When Champain couldn’t see, he reached back and gave my dick a squeeze that I recalled frequently for the next several years.”
There are uncomfortable, though hilarious, admissions such as the following: When I wasn’t praying to have a big penis, as I did every night, I prayed to be molested. It was a great blow to my ego that no grownup ever tried forcing me to perform oral sex on him. Wasn’t I as good as all the other kids who were supposedly being raped pretty much around the clock? Even then, I had a sense of the limited time at my disposal. I knew I could only attract child molesters for a scant few years.
When Sam’s support network find out about the threesome, he is roundly rejected by his friends, who consider him a pervert and a reprobate as a result. Sam is quite nonplussed by the reaction, as surely a mere threesome is the most vanilla of sexual peccadilloes …
Therein lies the true power of Arcade. Horrified though he or she may be at the outset, Drew Nellins Smith slowly draws the reader into this shadowy realm of repressed desire and thwarted longing.
We get to see what drives a sad, fucked-up person like Sam, and to both understand and empathise with him, with no implicit value judgement. And the fact that he finds some kind of redemption in the dark, foetid embrace of the arcade at the end is quite extraordinary. This is a truly special novel.
I think the author also has to tread a fine line between the reader’s natural prurience and outright aversion. However, the balance is certainly shifting. Niche books like Samuel R. Delany’s The Mad Man and Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, and the more recent and mainstream Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, deliberately set out to test the reader’s endurance and level of provocation.
Even though South Africa has recognised gay marriage since 2006, the fact that such places as described in Arcade still exist (persist?) here – from Johannesburg to Pretoria and Cape Town – speaks volumes about the level of discrimination simmering out there.
A lot of men who frequent such venues are bisexual, married with children or families, high-level professionals, educators, or celebrities, or have not ‘come out’ as of yet. As Drew Nellins Smith so rightly puts it: “One of the great gifts of the Arcade was the way it put us all on the same level.”
This not only refers to a level playing field, but a level of mutual acceptance and tolerance often lacking in society, the workplace, and even among family, friends, acquaintances, work colleagues (and especially career clients) despite legislative protection and constitutional guarantees.
There is no doubt that the main character of Arcade is pretty unstable. Not only does he eavesdrop on his ex-boyfriend’s email on a daily basis to check out how his ‘replacement’ is doing, known only as the Kid, he also phones said boyfriend on a regular basis to insist that the relationship is actually not over. Being the sane and decent human being he is, the ex does everything in his power to disabuse our protagonist of this notion.
Known only by the pseudonym ‘Sam’, “a name I sometimes used with men”, we are not even sure if our protagonist is ‘gay’ in the generally acceptable definition of the word, that is enjoying sexual relations with men. Whenever he goes to the arcade, he insists he is only there to observe, and not to participate. (These observations are rendered vividly and, surprisingly, with great tenderness and affection, even the smells and the shit and other detritus littering the floors.)
Sam recounts a threesome with a friend and a woman: “While my buddy fucked her that night, I stuck my fingers inside of her and felt his dick sliding along my hand. When Champain couldn’t see, he reached back and gave my dick a squeeze that I recalled frequently for the next several years.”
There are uncomfortable, though hilarious, admissions such as the following: When I wasn’t praying to have a big penis, as I did every night, I prayed to be molested. It was a great blow to my ego that no grownup ever tried forcing me to perform oral sex on him. Wasn’t I as good as all the other kids who were supposedly being raped pretty much around the clock? Even then, I had a sense of the limited time at my disposal. I knew I could only attract child molesters for a scant few years.
When Sam’s support network find out about the threesome, he is roundly rejected by his friends, who consider him a pervert and a reprobate as a result. Sam is quite nonplussed by the reaction, as surely a mere threesome is the most vanilla of sexual peccadilloes …
Therein lies the true power of Arcade. Horrified though he or she may be at the outset, Drew Nellins Smith slowly draws the reader into this shadowy realm of repressed desire and thwarted longing.
We get to see what drives a sad, fucked-up person like Sam, and to both understand and empathise with him, with no implicit value judgement. And the fact that he finds some kind of redemption in the dark, foetid embrace of the arcade at the end is quite extraordinary. This is a truly special novel.
November 6, 2016
Let’s talk about great American filth, not the great American novel. John Updike and all his drinking buddies pronounced its death a long time ago. Whether the proverbial white whale of literature breathes still or gurgled its last breath in 2001 with Franzen’s The Corrections the subject is still boring. The conversation is just about as boring as the subject of the great American novel. Want to know what isn’t boring—filth. Bukowski, Miller, Fante—these guys can’t write a dull sentence. On his good days, even Updike could rank amongst the dirty American writers. Certainly the cunt Updike so perfectly cued up in Couples that Norman Mailer stole for his maudlin noir Tough Guys Don’t Dance was about as good an example of perfect filth as anyone was writing in 1970s America.
Enter Drew Nellins Smith. Here’s a debut novelist who knows his way around a good sentence. Anybody who spends more than a few hours scribbling in notebooks understands pretty sentences and a token will get them on the subway. But Smith has chosen to do something more than scrawl pretty sentences. He has thrown himself in the ring with the big guns.
Smith’s unnamed narrator stumbles through the hot Texas afternoons and evenings visiting a porno theater on the outskirts of Austin. A place where men meet to hook up. Not much different from the highway rest stops of the 1950s and 60s where men kept their sexuality secret for fear of losing their jobs, stature in the community, even their lives. Probably smells like a mix of a twelve-year-old boy’s sock drawer and a boxing gym above 178th Street.
Our nameless hero has just been through a breakup; he’s dancing around coming out of the closet; and now he’s wandered into a new world
losing their jobs, stature in the community, even their lives. Probably smells like a mix of a twelve-year-old boy’s sock drawer and a boxing gym above 178th Street.
Our nameless hero has just been through a breakup; he’s dancing around coming out of the closet; and now he’s wandered into a new world where the rules of the game are as cloudy as the back room of Willie Stark’s favorite bar.
The hot topic of the literature de jour is diversity. But diversity for diversities sake is somewhat meaningless. Yes, the white, middle age angst has had its fair shake, and nobody really has anything interesting to add to that conversation. But where Smith really shines is putting guy literature in the ring with the likes of Bukowski, Miller, and Fante. His book reads semi-autobiographically. Just like Hank Chinaski rolling around his grimy apartment with Lydia Vance, Smith’s character’s shoes stick to the floor of the arcade as he gets blowies from randos.
The beauty of Smith’s writing is that his character’s gayness, while important, is secondary. He’s an alien in an alien place just like any of Sarte’s characters roving about in their existential malaise. This is the kind of writing diversity literature needs. It doesn’t need to stop and scream in the street look at me, I’m different, notice me. It needs to jump in the ring with the canonical writers and throw a few jabs.
Enter Drew Nellins Smith. Here’s a debut novelist who knows his way around a good sentence. Anybody who spends more than a few hours scribbling in notebooks understands pretty sentences and a token will get them on the subway. But Smith has chosen to do something more than scrawl pretty sentences. He has thrown himself in the ring with the big guns.
Smith’s unnamed narrator stumbles through the hot Texas afternoons and evenings visiting a porno theater on the outskirts of Austin. A place where men meet to hook up. Not much different from the highway rest stops of the 1950s and 60s where men kept their sexuality secret for fear of losing their jobs, stature in the community, even their lives. Probably smells like a mix of a twelve-year-old boy’s sock drawer and a boxing gym above 178th Street.
Our nameless hero has just been through a breakup; he’s dancing around coming out of the closet; and now he’s wandered into a new world
losing their jobs, stature in the community, even their lives. Probably smells like a mix of a twelve-year-old boy’s sock drawer and a boxing gym above 178th Street.
Our nameless hero has just been through a breakup; he’s dancing around coming out of the closet; and now he’s wandered into a new world where the rules of the game are as cloudy as the back room of Willie Stark’s favorite bar.
The hot topic of the literature de jour is diversity. But diversity for diversities sake is somewhat meaningless. Yes, the white, middle age angst has had its fair shake, and nobody really has anything interesting to add to that conversation. But where Smith really shines is putting guy literature in the ring with the likes of Bukowski, Miller, and Fante. His book reads semi-autobiographically. Just like Hank Chinaski rolling around his grimy apartment with Lydia Vance, Smith’s character’s shoes stick to the floor of the arcade as he gets blowies from randos.
The beauty of Smith’s writing is that his character’s gayness, while important, is secondary. He’s an alien in an alien place just like any of Sarte’s characters roving about in their existential malaise. This is the kind of writing diversity literature needs. It doesn’t need to stop and scream in the street look at me, I’m different, notice me. It needs to jump in the ring with the canonical writers and throw a few jabs.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 30, 2022
Wow this book is so good.
February 14, 2017
A look at varied characters who come to an XXX arcade in a small town as told by a 28 year old who obsesses about a cop he met there. The character is so stupid that I could not get into it. Even a comment that AIDS resulted from all the NYC city gays having wild sex in the back of trucks proved how ignorant this guy is. This was taking place in the 21st Century with emails, grinder etc. which made this very hard to believe.
August 27, 2016
This one really didn't work out for me.
It's not the book, it's me.
It's not the book, it's me.
February 9, 2026
There's plenty to like about Arcade—the way its frustrating, immature, and closeted narrator tests readers' patience with his behavior and unreliability, for example. As an Austinite myself, I loved picturing the city in a different era, a time when the city's edges weren't so worn away and someone who works at a motel could still pay rent. And I enjoyed that the book's primary tension was between the narrator and himself. Nellins Smith's prose is clear but shallow. I felt like there was so much life teeming beneath the surface of what the narrator was telling us but he never consistently digs into it. The arc of the novel struck me as better suited to a short story because there isn't enough conflict—nor enough difficult decisions—to truly sustain 250 pages. Almost every time the protagonist approaches deep discomfort or a real a crossroads moment, Nellins Smith flinches and slowly backs away, much like his narrator in the arcade. We can only watch the protagonist make the same choices so many times. My other quibble is the role of email in this story, which, for a book set in the mid-2010s, feels out of date.
I ultimately enjoyed Arcade for what I believe it is: a breezy window into an almost-extinct type of venue and way of cruising; a glimpse at some artifacts of gay life in the 2000s; an image, however stifled and irritating, of deep self-loathing and internal conflict. I only wish Nellins Smith had given us more to look at, more to feel, and more to consider. He could have swung for the fences!
I ultimately enjoyed Arcade for what I believe it is: a breezy window into an almost-extinct type of venue and way of cruising; a glimpse at some artifacts of gay life in the 2000s; an image, however stifled and irritating, of deep self-loathing and internal conflict. I only wish Nellins Smith had given us more to look at, more to feel, and more to consider. He could have swung for the fences!
March 13, 2018
Reading Challenge 2018- Bookish: book with a one-word title. A fascinating look into the adult arcade. Smith places the reader in the location through the short chapters narrated by the main character. He is an obsessive individual who wants to get back together with a policeman he had had a relationship with, only to be obstructed by the introduction of a new relationship with someone younger than he. The main character explores in detail the goings on at the arcade, including the diverse people he meets, the subtle communication process with these individuals, and all the trappings that belong with a social experience in an adult arcade. He is trapped in his own world, not willing to change or look for something to make himself better, often fantasizing about possibilities that will never come to fruition. It was an intriguing read that was difficult to put down in a voyeuristic sense as I wanted to know what would happen to the main character in the end.
March 2, 2023
Not sure where I picked up this book but I was cleaning my "dirty" book section and decided to read one per month. Arcade is defiantly not for the closed minded and the topic is not for everyone but I found it interesting. Essentially the book explains about what goes on at sex shops that have arcades in the back. If you don't know what an arcade is let me explain. In the back of sex shops is an area you can pay to go into and there are separate little cubbies that you can sit and watch adult films. You can close the door and be in there alone or with whomever you brought with you, or you can eave the door open and allow someone else to come in and watch, play, or to person consensual sex acts. Majority are gay men but straight men will come in and sometimes even couples. It was interesting reading about the mans experience and what goes on in these places.
February 2, 2021
Like watching a train wreck. The main character is well written, his dislikability a testament to that. Sam is self involved, manipulative, bad to his friends, judgmental, cynical and stalking his ex. All of this unfolds and just makes you want to read more. Prepare yourself for some pretty descriptive sexual acts. Reading this book I felt like I was at an old school carnival freak show, the kind where you’re not sure how legal this all is, or if you should tell anyone what you’d seen, but somehow, no matter what goes on it’s all fascinating and keeps you engrossed.
July 24, 2017
Tolle Sprache und scharfe Beobachtungen. Eine Weile. Dann geht es nicht weiter, sondern dreht sich endlos um aussichtslose Unterfangen (Pornokino, verflossener Halblover,…). Und als es interessant werden könnte hat das Buch noch 5 Seiten dafür übrig. Gähn.
Wenn das autobiografisch ist tut mir der Autor sehr leid, dass er das noch Jahrzehnte später aufschreiben musste.
Wenn das autobiografisch ist tut mir der Autor sehr leid, dass er das noch Jahrzehnte später aufschreiben musste.
January 24, 2021
An attempt to try something very different. Casual gay sex at a video store. I found myself laughing with the main character and some interesting tidbits (haaa) on how guys can pick each other up for a hole in the wall quickie with no relationship. However I just don’t have the urge to know more and setting this one aside after the halfway mark. Enjoy yourself boyzzzz
August 10, 2023
This sat in my stack for a while and is a dark and seedy tale following a man's obsession with an adult video shop. Absolutely obsessive and depraved, but also humanizing and humiliating. It's well written and full of details - perhaps an anachronism in the 21st century BUT if you remember these strange places (even if you never visited) this is the dark underworld of the fantasy.
May 3, 2019
I can not bring my self to finish this book about a sexually frustrated american closeted homosexual. Even fast-reading could not save this book for me.
I did not get past Chapter 39.
Lets just say it is not my style of book...
I did not get past Chapter 39.
Lets just say it is not my style of book...
October 27, 2023
There were definitely well written parts, however I came to find myself very frustrated by the main character. I finished the book because it felt wrong to just leave it unfinished, but I don’t think it would be a book I’d go back to.
May 18, 2017
This book, is a great exploration into the subtle difference between the need vs the desire to make emotional vs sexual connections in the gay and not honest south.
June 28, 2017
The narrator is too whiny. He sounds like a twelve year old instead of twenty-eight. Also, the book is littered with cliches.
May 1, 2021
Very dark yet somewhat relatable exploration of what it means to be gay in modern times
March 28, 2019
Americans have a hard time with sex. We are simultaneously obsessed with it and repelled by it. This is the case with the protagonist of Drew Nellins Smith's debut novel Arcade, the tale of a nameless character's compulsion to seek anonymous sexual encounters with men at a XXX arcade located on the outskirts of a small Texas town. What on the surface seems like a provocative gadfly's view into a demimonde where men of all backgrounds and races blur the lines between gay, straight, and bisexual to fulfill their most ardent sexual desires turns out to be a frustratingly restrained text filled with missed opportunities and inconsistencies.
First, the good: The pleasure of Arcade is the author's ability to convey the atmosphere of the arcade and its denizens. Smith deftly captures the way these men rove the cruising spot for sex, bringing to life all the protocols, signals, behaviors, protestations, longings, and frustrations experienced by any man who has ever spent time in such places. This novel puts the gay marketplace of desire on full display. In one particularly telling chapter, the protagonist comments on how he would visit the arcade some nights and find himself the object of every man's desire, yet on other nights he was treated like a pariah for no reason. His descriptions of the XXX arcade itself and the horny ballet these men dance as they cruise for just the right partner(s) are spot-on. The book has an economy with words that sometimes works against it (the language is guarded in some places) but it lends immediacy to the rather impulsive sex acts that take place so fast they often catch the protagonist (sometimes referred to as Sam) off guard. Smith--who has claimed in interviews that this novel is between forty- and sixty-percent nonfiction--nails the particular scenarios that play out at the arcade, and never for one moment do those moments feel inauthentic. The scenes involving the Cyclops, the bull, and the blissed-out marine lifted off the page and elevated the novel.
Now, the bad: Smith has given readers a character that is especially hard to relate to, not because of his predilections but because the character is an amalgam of compulsions, preferences, and neuroses that never integrate. I never once believed that a man who has no qualms about paying women for three-way sexual encounters with his married friend would recoil at a stranger's attempt to fellate him. I never once believed that the cop and the kid, who lived together and conducted a close, intimate relationship, would discuss such intense moments of their lives via email. Arcade falls into the trap of many first novels--it appears to be too close to the author's own life for him to be objective about it. The narrator is a man who, despite his multiple sexual excursions, does not act on the world, and he resists any attempts of the world to act on him. Where is the investment for the reader? The character at the end of the novel is just the same as he was when it began. What is the lesson for both him and the reader? It seems the author merely wanted to give readers a 223-page ethnographic study of down low sex between men rather than an engaging, transformative work of literature.
Finally, I take issue with the author's/narrator's penchant for refusing to name most of the characters. They are referred to as "the cop," "the kid," "the bull," "the marine" and so forth. This practice strips the characters of their humanity and, frankly, steals some life from the text. This practice is especially troubling in regard to the cop. If the narrator claims that he and the cop had a genuine relationship and the cop is the love of his life, one would think he would at least have the common courtesy to give us his name.
Despite Arcade's numerous flaws, Drew Nellins Smith is a good writer. First novels are often difficult to conceive. Had Smith written the novel in third-person, I suspect it would have gained more purpose. Nevertheless, I hope his next book avoids the missteps he encounters here and strives for something greater than a sleazy peek-a-boo tale that ultimately doesn't get anyone off in any way.
First, the good: The pleasure of Arcade is the author's ability to convey the atmosphere of the arcade and its denizens. Smith deftly captures the way these men rove the cruising spot for sex, bringing to life all the protocols, signals, behaviors, protestations, longings, and frustrations experienced by any man who has ever spent time in such places. This novel puts the gay marketplace of desire on full display. In one particularly telling chapter, the protagonist comments on how he would visit the arcade some nights and find himself the object of every man's desire, yet on other nights he was treated like a pariah for no reason. His descriptions of the XXX arcade itself and the horny ballet these men dance as they cruise for just the right partner(s) are spot-on. The book has an economy with words that sometimes works against it (the language is guarded in some places) but it lends immediacy to the rather impulsive sex acts that take place so fast they often catch the protagonist (sometimes referred to as Sam) off guard. Smith--who has claimed in interviews that this novel is between forty- and sixty-percent nonfiction--nails the particular scenarios that play out at the arcade, and never for one moment do those moments feel inauthentic. The scenes involving the Cyclops, the bull, and the blissed-out marine lifted off the page and elevated the novel.
Now, the bad: Smith has given readers a character that is especially hard to relate to, not because of his predilections but because the character is an amalgam of compulsions, preferences, and neuroses that never integrate. I never once believed that a man who has no qualms about paying women for three-way sexual encounters with his married friend would recoil at a stranger's attempt to fellate him. I never once believed that the cop and the kid, who lived together and conducted a close, intimate relationship, would discuss such intense moments of their lives via email. Arcade falls into the trap of many first novels--it appears to be too close to the author's own life for him to be objective about it. The narrator is a man who, despite his multiple sexual excursions, does not act on the world, and he resists any attempts of the world to act on him. Where is the investment for the reader? The character at the end of the novel is just the same as he was when it began. What is the lesson for both him and the reader? It seems the author merely wanted to give readers a 223-page ethnographic study of down low sex between men rather than an engaging, transformative work of literature.
Finally, I take issue with the author's/narrator's penchant for refusing to name most of the characters. They are referred to as "the cop," "the kid," "the bull," "the marine" and so forth. This practice strips the characters of their humanity and, frankly, steals some life from the text. This practice is especially troubling in regard to the cop. If the narrator claims that he and the cop had a genuine relationship and the cop is the love of his life, one would think he would at least have the common courtesy to give us his name.
Despite Arcade's numerous flaws, Drew Nellins Smith is a good writer. First novels are often difficult to conceive. Had Smith written the novel in third-person, I suspect it would have gained more purpose. Nevertheless, I hope his next book avoids the missteps he encounters here and strives for something greater than a sleazy peek-a-boo tale that ultimately doesn't get anyone off in any way.
April 10, 2022
full of sleaze
August 25, 2016
An excellent piece of erotica where the author uses the protagonist's love interests and sexual exploits to explore themes of atomisation, alienation of labour, class warfare, friendship, sexuality, homophobia, and disgust. What I feared was that the novel would become a sort of coming of age novel, but it's not. At the end of the novel, the protagonist's internal and external conflicts remain unresolved and he, along with the reader, are left to cope. One of my favourite novels from the unnamed press publishers.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 30, 2016
Arcade is sexy, gritty and sad. I'd like to give it 5 stars, but I feel like the book is missing just a little bit of something -- Maybe some kind of resolve or even a suggestive glimpse at the narrator's future.
October 12, 2016
I wanted to care.....
but didn't.
but didn't.
June 23, 2016
Review to come on Electric Literature
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