The basic plot of Jim Grimsley's Boulevard–naïve young country hick finds himself, socially and sexually, in the big city–has been novelized nearly as often as it's been lived out in reality. But Grimsley still makes it all sound as new for readers as it must feel for the small-town boys living out the cliché. Boulevard opens in 1976, a few years before the initial stirrings of the AIDS crisis changed America's sexual landscape. Newell, an inexperienced young man just a few steps short of tabula rasa, comes to New Orleans with roughly $600 in his pocket. He's determined to live on Bourbon Street, find a job, and earn the right to be a native. Grimsley follows his small early struggles, as he explores the city, learns things about the world that he'd missed in rural Alabama, lives off cold soup out of the can, sleeps on a bare bed with his folded jeans as a pillow, and obsessively counts his fast-disappearing cash. Eventually, Newell gets a job as a busboy in a restaurant where his good looks upset the delicate social order, as jealousies surface among the all-male staff and the manager asks him out, then fires him for not responding. Though fascinated by the brutish, confrontational-looking men in a certain type of gay pornography, Newell resists attempts to draw him into New Orleans' gay scene before he's had a chance to fully shape his own identity. Once he finally does, Boulevard leads up to a relatively predictable, heavily foreshadowed climax, but the journey is leisurely, and the road there makes many intriguing detours. Grimsley's rhythmic, calm-voiced, detail-saturated prose focuses more on Newell's surroundings and his immediate reactions than his internal life; as a result, his narrow, site-specific experiences feel universal and enveloping. The story unfolds inch by calculated inch, then suddenly veers wildly off-track to encompass the first-person points of view of other characters in Newell's immediate orbit. They include an elderly transsexual who only permits herself to be a crazy alcoholic on the weekends, a Tulane grad student who introduces Newell to acid, and a sadist who introduces him to new kinds of pain. Grimsley's deceptively controlled stream-of-consciousness style works particularly well as he explores the intricacies of an LSD trip, but it also shapes a uniquely dark and quiet version of New Orleans, as seen through the eyes of a dynamic, sympathetic character who seems to take everything as a learning experience, without ever stooping to lecture readers about what he's learning.