Tracy Quan's Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl

And to think I spent my most attractive years living on spaghetti adorned by butter and salt. Tracy Quan sure didn't, and neither has her heroine Nancy Chan, star of Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl (Crown, 288 pages, $22). My early desperation-fueled attempts at hustling were so inept (chatting about French art history to a middle-aged Chinese trick in a newish Japanese hotel) that the meticulous Nancy Chan wouldn't have given me a hot minute.

Quan's more generous in this novel loosely disguised as diary. It starts with Chan lying on top of a client, moaning and cooing as if she's being eaten out by her girlfriend, when actually her partner's licking the guy's balls and the play-acting is for naught. The john catches on to her shtick, but an irritated Chan "brazened it out with professional blitheness."

A complete snob of a higher-rung prostitute, Chan is in a huff most of the time, and were I to review this novel as gossip?a mistake made so often these days?I might think author Quan, a real-life former high-priced call girl, was in a snit herself. There are so many rules that hookers and johns oughta follow, and such intense consumption and grooming involved in keeping the whole exchange proper.

"People want to read about snobs," Quan tells me. "Look at Jane Austen."

The novel famously ran as a serial on Salon for a long time. Of course the titillation of professional sex was Quan's in, yet her weirdly astute observations of upper-class New York City culture and sexual mores are most likely what kept her in. There's always a layer of manners in the book. Chan's engaged to a Wall Street guy who doesn't know she's a hottie; she dresses in conservative upper-class attire when not out hustling a trick. Meanwhile, the straight girls in the book dress in provocative navel-baring attire that shocks even the seasoned pro in Chan. She has to act like a preppie ingenue with one client, a dull copy editor with her fiance's sister and an eager bisexual when putting on a show. She's always thinking something else, feeling something else?but of course this happens in most social satire (see Thomas Berger's Houseguest, for example).

Diary is a good read, if a little long. There are a few subplots going, and Quan plays around with the very idea of social taboo. One professional call girl who sees clients at home is worried that the co-op board will discover her violation of all things sacred: that she's secretly installed an extra bathroom. A desperate young woman comes to a NYCOT meeting, a loose satire of PONY, the political organization for sex workers' rights, with which Quan works. She has a problem too serious even for the aid of her empowered sisters in "sex work" (a term Nancy and Quan despise, by the way): she's being blackmailed by an 11-year-old child who threatens to accuse her of abuse if she doesn't cough up. Elsewhere, a john commits the ultimate sin even within the private world of sexual charade for remuneration: he rats out a girl to the IRS.

Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl isn't a seamy tell-all. Quan is far too classy for that. She admits to (boasts of?) having been a 14-year-old runaway who got into prostitution early and knocked around awhile before bluffing her way into a top agency, where she became a canny "quota professional" (a certain amount of money must be hauled in each week, even if it just goes to Bergdorf's and the waxing salon). As W.H. Auden noted: "A suffering, a weakness, which cannot be expressed as an aphorism should not be mentioned."

When it comes out in paperback, Diary will be a must-have for all those whose shelves already contain worked-over paperbacks of Valley of the Dolls, The Naked Civil Servant, Junkie, the novels of Kingsley Amis (but never Martin) and The Talented Mr. Ripley. Then there's the new gay science-fiction novel by Alvin Orloff, I Married an Earthling (from San Francisco's Manic D Press), featuring a hunky alien academic from a planet where hairdressers are the highest-ranking citizens. In Diary, "hairdressers are clued in to the ever-changing, temporary nature of happiness. They know there are only good hair moments. A good day may consist of many such moments strung together like beads, but this cannot be guaranteed. It can only be experienced. I think this affects their entire view of love, life, and human connection."

I've been waiting for this genre?one in which hairdressers assume their proper role in the social hierarchy. They were the first people I met who hinted of a place in the world that included me, before I myself had a chance to grow into a promiscuous pill-popper. In Algeria, which according to the waitress at the Mona Lisa Cafe is "not a free society," hairdressers were slain first during the revolution. It turns out there is more to the world than an intriguing dye-job: Tracy Quan has taught me, as a mannered citizen, to look at my scandalously unwaxed pubic hair with new horror.