The Gold Diggers

by Paul Monette

Book by Monette, Paul

Genres: Fiction, Gay, Gay Fiction, LGBT, Queer

384 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

Online Guide to Paul Monette's papers at UCLA:
http://findaid.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/...

In novels, poetry, and a memoir, Paul Monette wrote about gay men striving to fashion personal identities and, later, coping with the loss of a lover to AIDS.

Monette was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1945. He was educated at prestigious schools in New England: Phillips Andover Academy and Yale University, where he received his B.A. in 1967. He began his prolific writing career soon after graduating from Yale. For eight years, he wrote poetry exclusively.

After coming out in his late twenties, he met Roger Horwitz, who was to be his lover for over twenty years. Also during his late twenties, he grew disillusioned with poetry and shifted his interest to the novel, not to return to poetry until the 1980s.

In 1977, Monette and Horwitz moved to Los Angeles. Once in Hollywood, Monette wrote a number of screenplays that, though never produced, provided him the means to be a writer. Monette published four novels between 1978 and 1982. These novels were enormously successful and established his career as a writer of popular fiction. He also wrote several novelizations of films.

Monette's life changed dramatically when Roger Horwitz was diagnosed with AIDS in the early 1980s. After Horwitz's death in 1986, Monette wrote extensively about the years of their battles with AIDS (Borrowed Time, 1988) and how he himself coped with losing a lover to AIDS (Love Alone, 1988). These works are two of the most powerful accounts written about AIDS thus far.

Their publication catapulted Monette into the national arena as a spokesperson for AIDS. Along with fellow writer Larry Kramer, he emerged as one of the most familiar and outspoken AIDS activists of our time. Since very few out gay men have had the opportunity to address national issues in mainstream venues at any previous time in U.S. history, Monette's high-visibility profile was one of his most significant achievements. He went on to write two important novels about AIDS, Afterlife (1990) and Halfway Home (1991). He himself died of AIDS-related complications in 1995.

In his fiction, Monette unabashedly depicts gay men who strive to fashion personal identities that lead them to love, friendship, and self-fulfillment. His early novels generally begin where most coming-out novels end; his protagonists have already come to terms with their sexuality long before the novels' projected time frames. Monette has his characters negotiate family relations, societal expectations, and personal desires in light of their decisions to lead lives as openly gay men.

Two major motifs emerge in these novels: the spark of gay male relations and the dynamic alternative family structures that gay men create for themselves within a homophobic society. These themes are placed in literary forms that rely on the structures of romance, melodrama, and fantasy.

Monette's finest novel, Afterlife, combines the elements of traditional comedy and the resistance novel; it is the first gay novel written about AIDS that fuses personal love interests with political activism.

Monette's harrowing collection of deeply personal poems, Love Alone: 18 Elegies for Rog, conveys both the horrors of AIDS and the inconsolable pain of love lost. The elegies are an invaluable companion to Borrowed Time.

Before the publication and success of his memoir, Becoming a Man, it seemed inevitable that Monette would be remembered most for his writings on AIDS. Becoming a Man, however, focuses on the dilemmas of growing up gay. It provides at once an unsparing account of the nightmare of the closet and a moving and often humorous depiction of the struggle to come out. Becoming a Man won the 1992 National Book Award for nonfiction, a historical moment in the history

Reviews

[Icy_Space_Cobwebs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Delightful and detectable; intellectual and emotive; historically grounded and contemporaneously soaring, the late Paul Monette' s "The Gold Diggers" is truly a gem. Amazingly, it was his debut novel, yet it proves to be the work of an accomplished and talented author. He has a surgical approach to his characters, flaying them down to metaphorical muscle and nerve in his ability to know them better than they know themselves, to illuminate their lights as well as their shadow.

[Dana]

Sadly, I've been unable to finish this book. I really enjoyed Halfway Home: A Novel, but I just couldn't get into this one. The constantly changing POV was irritating and it just felt like a chore to read.

So, if you want to try Monette, skip this one and read Halfway Home instead.

[Greg · Rating 2 out of 5]

fun 80's gay book

[Ken · Rating 3 out of 5]

Firstly, I don't consider myself an expert on the works of Paul Monette being as this is only the second novel of his that I've read. The Gold Diggers is very well written but I found it a bit "long-winded". The author seems to go out of his way to make all the (rather simply) characters hopelessly complicated. I wouldn't even necessarily call this a gay novel, the story could just as easily been told using all straight characters with only a few minor changes in details.

The gist of the story goes like this: Rita decides to leave NYC and go to Los Angeles to live with her gay best friend Peter and his partner, Nick. While living in their house, Rita discovers a hidden room filled with stolen art treasures. Just when Rita, Peter, and Nick are deciding on their next move, a male prostitute (that Nick had been diddling on the side) pops up out of the bushes (literally) and decides to take Peter and a priceless Rembrandt painting from the secret room hostage.

[Sebastian · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really liked this, but I understand why it's the least liked of Monette's novels. Excluding his one heterosexual book this is also the last of Monette that I hadn't read yet, which greatly informs my experience, so just know that reading forward.

This feels like a bit of a rough draft of The Last Shot, basically. Of course Monette just likes to revolve his pre-AIDS novels around Old Hollywood in some way in general, but... having a mysterious dead character who's a fictional famous guy in the film industry and their actual in-universe works don't get shown until pretty much the very end of the book.... I'm not necessarily saying it's bad, just saying it's a pretty specific thing to do twice in a row, lol. Monette really did hone it with The Last Shot though.

The strengths that come through in this are of course as always Monette's prose, his characterization, crafting rich backstories and supplying them organically, his general hyperrealistic grasp on human nature, and the sheer specificity of abstract truisms that he consistently makes about it. I was enjoying this deeply for about 3/4ths of the way, noticing that moreso than any of his other novels very little actual events were happening but also that I didn't mind, that I in fact felt a bit vindicated wrt my own writing and my hesitance to create actual conflict, because Monette proves time and time again that it IS possible to make a good story that has little to no conflict... if you just make up for it by writing well enough.

However, where he slipped with The Gold Diggers was attempting to craft a non-narrative around a real conflict that he didn't quite have the chops for. All those truisms about life and human nature are great when a character is just sitting around a mansion sipping tea or hustling in west hollywood. But they're simply not going to do anything to aid you when someone's got a gun on you and is trying to rob you and kidnap someone and eventually blow some people up with dynamite or something. And I'd say that Monette's charm and talent here is that he does write just SO beautifully that I never quite thought "this is the buffer of a coward who doesn't want to write real action"... but I was very aware that that was what other people likely thought at the time that it was written. My take on it isn't all that different, I guess--I think Monette had a lot of passions about film and literature and art and history and he was VERY well-studied there, which is why the beginning felt grounded, at least enough to balance out the prose. However, true cowboy violence was only something he could dream about at the time, so everything became a bit of introspective nonsense when he tried to place his characters in it.

I also have to say I'm disappointed by Sam and his ending. The first half-chapter that was devoted to his POV and his backstory was fascinating, but then I just feel like his motivations became inscrutable by the end. His plan makes no sense. There was no payoff in his death and also no feeling attached TO the lack of payoff either. I suppose it connects with the total lack of guilt or consequences over Rita killing Frances Dean, but like... why? These people aren't psychopaths. They're CONSTANTLY feeling things. They're all incredibly self-aware, but actual deaths just like... don't mean anything to them? It's just strange.

So yeah, it feels bad to say, but this is definitely his worst work. Still, I'd say that the fact that I liked most of it anyway says a lot about how great of a writer Monette was.

[MISSed Bandwagon · Rating 2 out of 5]

I tried to read this novel, I really, REALLY did, but in the end I just couldn’t finish it. The writing feels unnecessarily complicated and while the characters aren’t boring I just don’t feel like their lives are entertaining enough to write a book about them. The most exciting thing in the book is Rita’s discovery of the priceless art pieces in the hideaway closet. But it’s what she does afterwards that’s such a let down. She carefully and respectfully gives them back to their proper owners without even holding out for so much as a penny. I understand that art and history mean a lot to her, but for something that was supposed to be such a major find she didn’t face any oppositional forces. Some different choices would have been:

She hides the precious art from Nick, Peter, and Hey and slowly starts to sell them out of the house.
She lets Nick in on her little operation and he is overridden with guilt because not only has he been slowly falling out of love with Peter, but now he’s stealing from him too. (And thus the thrill and rush of it all prompts them to have sex and not that weird and random scene in the closet.
Rita shares her discovery with Nick, but she wants to return things to their rightful owners while he wants to sell them for a profit.
Scenario 3, but vice versa.

I didn’t finish the book because I thought, “even if I finish this book, what’s going to come of this?” There’s been no real conflict except for the snakebite incident and it took so long to get to the point it was over before it really even started. I reached halfway through the novel before giving up because there was nothing to resolve or nothing to look forward to concluding.
I think what made me the most upset is the word vomit and inability to paint the scene. I can’t tell you how many times my eyes glazed across the page and my mind gently dozing asleep. I didn’t mind the backstories so much, but they went on for too long and truthfully didn’t offer any real insight into who the characters were and why they act the way that they do. I think the person whose background I was most interested in was Sam’s. He lived a life of intrigue and spontaneity that even the most rebellious dystopian YA novel protagonist could rival. It made sense why Nick was starting to have deeper feelings for him and why he was angry at himself FOR feeling those feelings. But, Nick was left to attend to Peter and in typical and expected Sam fashion, he dipped to let Nick deal with that on his own. I feel like Sam should have been more involved in the story to stir up the pot and introduce some chaos and turmoil.
I had to give my honest criticism, but I don’t think I’ll be reading anything else by this author.

[Vanessa (V.C.) · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was…not good. None of the characters were interesting or worth getting to know. Almost all of this book was them just talking about nothing important or ruminating on the past. The Gold Diggers was way too long and felt overly complicated for no reason, where it was trying too hard to have us believe that their lives are chaotic or exciting or dramatic or something when they're actually just woefully boring and uninteresting. I know that Paul Monette is more well-known for his memoirs, but this was just plain silly and uneventful. Why this was reprinted as a classic is beyond me.

[Michael North · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ugh, one of the worst novels I’ve made myself finish, and only because of a book group. Paul Monette is known mostly for his outstanding memoirs written during the AIDS crisis, but even he said that the novels he wrote in his early career were “silly.” Wow, that’s an understatement. I couldn’t like or care about a single character, and nearly everything they said or did was shallow and cliché. I can’t believe Alyson reprinted it in 1988.

[Timothy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved it. I love Paul Monette

[Maria Beltrami · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of those stories that can be setted only in the US, through New York and Los Angeles, made of characters over the top, riches and ostentatious luxury, of incipient sexual liberation still immune from AIDS. In such a situation they move five outlandish characters: a gay couple, their "servant" with identity problems, a woman who by dint of disappointment in love loves them all impartially, a male prostitute. The interaction between these characters and the house they live in, built by a tycoon of silent cinema and became mausoleum and safe for a former diva who has lost herself in drugs, are the heart of the story.
The exemplary and most dramatic figure is the male prostitute, with its lack of civilization and its living alone in his cock he seems to be the winner among all, and then prove the other hand, being devoid of real light, the only real loser.
While very nice. the book reflects the years in which it was written, and is sometimes lost in the maze of psychological that could have been solved in less than half of the pages without affecting the accuracy.
Thank Open Road Integrated Media and Netgalley for providing me with a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

Una di quelle storie che possono essere ambientate solo negli Stati Uniti, tra New York e Los Angeles, fatte di personaggi sopra le righe, di nuovi ricchi e di lusso ostentato, di incipiente liberazione sessuale ancora immune dall'AIDS. In una situazione del genere si muovono cinque stravaganti personaggi: una coppia di gay, il loro "servitore" con problemi di identità, una donna che a furia di delusioni amorose li ama tutti in modo imparziale, un prostituto. L'interazione tra questi personaggi e la casa in cui vivono, costruita da un magnate del cinema muto e diventata mausoleo e cassetta di sicurezza per una ex diva persasi nella droga, costituiscono il cuore della storia.
Il personaggio più emblematico, e drammatico, è proprio il prosituto, che con la sua mancanza di civilizzazione e il suo vivere solo nel suo cazzo sembra essere il vincente tra tutti, per poi dimostrarsi invece, privo com'è di reale leggerezza, l'unico e vero perdente.
Pur molto bello. il libro risente degli anni in cui è stato scritto, e a volte di perde in meandri psicologici che avrebbero potuto essere risolti in meno della metà delle pagine senza pregiudicarne l'accuratezza.
Ringrazio Open Road Integrated Media e Netgalley per avermi fornito una copia gratuita in cambio di una recensione onesta.

[Pam Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another cracker of a book from Paul Monette. Its a clever story of intrigue, suspense and mystery. The house on the hill had been a subject for many of buried treasure underneath it, so when a much needed break was the order of the day Rita found herself in the perfect place, only she didnt count on her friend emotional baggage coming with her the the mystery of the house.