Rent Boy by Gary Indiana
Published 1994 · 33,275 words · about 2 hours at an average pace
How hard is Rent Boy to read?
Rent Boy scores 55 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 52 out of 100
- Downtown slang and gallery vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 48 out of 100
- Short, acid, headlong sentences.
- Abstraction: 45 out of 100
- Concrete hustling with a running commentary on class.
- Information density: 48 out of 100
- Short and fast.
- Narrative indirection: 62 out of 100
- A narrator whose scorn conceals as much as it reveals.
- Symbolic density: 45 out of 100
- Comparatively little symbolic layering.
- Ironic distance: 82 out of 100
- Corrosive irony from beginning to end.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- The plot dissolves rather than resolves.
- Structural complexity: 45 out of 100
- Loose picaresque episodes.
How Rent Boy is regarded
Rent Boy holds a literary regard score of 42 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.