Title: What about the girl?
Product review: I'm amazed, and dismayed, that among all the reviews, both positive and negative, I found not a word about what I thought most troubling, and reprehensible, in this novel. Not a word about the devastating poverty that had led this young girl to prostitute herself to an old man in order to help her family. She is the figure for whom we ought to be concerned. Instead, there's not a word of sympathy for her plight or that of the hundreds of others whose bodies this John has bought. Instead we are supposed to feel empathy for, and share in the joy of, this old lecher as he drugs and uses a young girl (and many before her) in pursuit of a weird sort of attachment. The only authentic moment in the book is when the old pederast meets a prostitute from his past, with whom he thought he had a special relationship, and she has no clue who he even is. If there ever was a book written purely from a macho, misogynist perspective, this is it.
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