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Art & Books Books

DIARY OF A MANHATTAN CALL GIRL

DIARY OF A MANHATTAN CALL GIRL by Tracy Quan (Crown), 271 pages, $33 cloth. Rating: NN


Rarely does an author jump on as many bandwagons as Tracy Quan in Diary Of A Manhattan Call Girl. Think Memoirs Of A Geisha set in the Big Apple and written by Candace Bushnell, with a dash of the Sopranos thrown in for good measure. Drawing from her own experience, Quan takes us inside the mind of a prostitute to the Wall Street set. The book may be a marketing exec’s dream, but it’s no literary success. The graphic sex gets tiresome, and the half-assed plot (call girl gets engaged, tries to hide career from fiancé, sees shrink) has major holes. Quan’s prose is self-conscious hipster-wit, though she comes up with a few nifty neologisms — “nymphomercials” are cable TV ads for ladies of the night. Perhaps the clunky constructions and mixed verb tenses are intended to capture the slapdash feel of a diary, but they’re more distracting than evocative.

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