The golden age of promiscuity

Sean Devlin, at twenty - boyish, innocent, both fervent and controlled - drops out of Columbia University to pursue the downtown life of an avant-garde filmmaker. A variety of hustlers, an urbane, older, blue-blood mentor, and a charismatic performance artist on her way up are among his companions on his voyage of discovery.

With them, Devlin is repeatedly drawn to the excitement of the clubs - to Studio 54, and to the Flamingo, the Ramrod, the Anvil, the Mineshaft - where erotic rituals are enacted into the morning hours.

The novel brings to life a night world that no longer exists, a subterranean New York of drugs, dim lights, and strange bare rooms where medieval-seeming acts are performed and intimacy is anonymous. Energized, even hypnotized, by this scene, yet remaining detached, Devlin moves deliberately toward his goal - to be a famous filmmaker in the tradition of Warhol - and we watch him becoming, in the process, the ultimate voyeur, seeing and experiencing his own life through his camera.