Callgirl FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
When a bad boyfriend leaves with the contents of her checking account, professor and novelist Angell (The Illusionist; Wings; etc.) decides to stabilize her finances by responding to an ad seeking escorts. Surprisingly, the world she enters isn't all that different from the Boston dating scene she already knew; it's just far more lucrative. At least her clients are relatively clear about what they want, and Angell is able to teach by day and have "dates" by night for more than three years. Separation of her two worlds is crucial but not difficult: "what we do as prostitutes... does not constitute sex in our minds." The characters who populate this tour are often sympathetic, as is Angell, though her repeated assurances sometimes ring hollow in the face of her after-hours job's drug use, abuse and manipulative behavior. To process her own participation in prostitution, and to feed the fascinated responses of others, Angell eventually teaches a university-level class on its history that is, ironically, partly responsible for advancing her career to the point where she stops doing "calls" altogether. It also helped that she was nearly busted by an undercover cop, lost a dear friend to drugs and committed the faux pas of falling in love with a client. Now married, Angell winds down with a call to legalize prostitution to encourage regulation of this vast industry. Agent, Phillip Spitzer. (Aug.) Forecast: Callgirl is shaping up to be one of Permanent's most commercial books ever: Angell will appear on Oprah later this fall, and the book is a BookSense August pick, as well as a selection of all five BookSpan clubs. An excerpt will run in Boston magazine, and rights have been sold in 11 overseas countries, totaling with domestic rights sales more than $100,000. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Engrossing, no-holds-barred story of a college lecturer by day and a callgirl by night. When a live-in boyfriend (known here only as Peter the Rat Bastard) moved out in the mid-1990s and took the contents of their joint checking account with him, the author was strapped for cash. To supplement her small income as an adjunct sociology lecturer at a Boston-area college, she contacted the owner of an escort service whose ad had caught her attention. As a callgirl-in her view, "a skilled professional possessing an area of knowledge for which there is a demand"-she could net $140 an hour plus tips and keep her respectable day job. Angell signed on and found that her clients were ordinary guys, much like the men she had dated. Her blow-by-blow accounts of her encounters range from sexless eating bouts with a restaurant owner to an evening with a man who just wanted to wear her undergarments to "doubles" sessions with a client and a second callgirl. It's not all action, however; the author gives ample space to her thoughts about sex and prostitution. Besides the close-ups of the clients and their quirks, she paints deft profiles of the escort-service owner, known here as Peach, and of a cocaine-addicted co-worker. Angell brought the two sides of her life together in a course on the history and sociology of prostitution that led to some academic recognition and a heavier teaching load. Eventually, aware that her classroom work was deteriorating and that she wasn't getting any younger (she was in her mid-30s), she decided to quit her night job, pushed over the edge by a frightening brush with the law. While this reads like a memoir, a faint suspicion lingers that it could be fiction, like theauthor's previous work (The Illusionist, 2000, etc.). Either way, it provides a revelatory view of a life few women know much about.
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