'The Wild Boys'

As I finished The Wild Boys the other day, I began to wonder just when William S. Burroughs knew he was done with a novel.

If you've never read Burroughs, it's a wandering hodgepodge of thoughts with a less-than-developed plot (if there is one). Often, narrative is repeated. There's nothing that would be confused with a story arc: A beginning, middle and end. There's an end because there's a last page, there's an ending. In theory, there's little reason Burroughs could not have written 200, 500 or 1 million more pages to The Wild Boys. The end is no more of an end than the beginning or middle.

How does he determine this? Surely there's a feeling. Maybe the drugs wear off. Maybe he gets bored. I can all three happen. Maybe at once.

The Wild Boys, largely, is about homosexuality: This sub-culture of feral young men running wild having rabid sex with each other whenever and wherever they pretty well please. At some point, the story includes the American army invading North Africa to stop the Wild Boys. Thene there's a seperate story seemingly set in ancient South American culture.

Nonetheless, everyone's sexing each other up. Two dozen anal sex anecdotes later and that's The Wild Boys.

Someone who should be quoted, I guess, said, " [Burroughs] helped make homosexuality seem cool and highbrow, providing gay liberation with a delicious edge."

Let me tell you something, there isn't a thing in The Wild Boys that makes homosexuality "cool or highbrow." It's vicious and carnal. It's not love making. It's ejaculation. The two shouldn't be mixed up.