Take a 40-year-old homosexual who is a compulsive reader of the world literary canon as well as a former porn movie actor, living off unemployment in Los Angeles (though he occasionally works as a TV stand-in).

Put him in a one-room apartment across the street from an Orthodox Jewish school, give him a computer on which he can catalog the library of his recently deceased friend Christopher Isherwood and at the same time work on his own attempts at fiction.

Have him sit outside most of each day, wearing only shorts, reading (everything from Plato to Spinoza). Give him a formidably analytical, probing mind, and a life that has led him to achieve a level of honesty about himself, the world, and his place in it that few even come close to (if you ask him a question, be prepared for an answer whose simple, straightforward honesty is absolutely disarming).

Then let him begin to pay attention to the attire of the Chassidic boys in the school and their insular talk and behavior as they pass by on his sidewalk. Have him slowly become fascinated by these carefully formed young products of one of the oldest religious cultures in the world. Allow his interest to grow and flourish to the point where he over a period of months acquires and wears first a yarmulke, then tzitzis, then a black greatcoat, then the Chassidic hat, all the while expanding his verbal interaction with the boys from the school. Their deism and virulent homophobia vs. his atheism and unashamed homosexuality.

Mix well, and you have Rick Sandford’s remarkable novel The Boys Across the Street.

I don’t know of a book like it. Nothing even close. A kind of a diary, recounting the day-by-day encounters of the protagonist, also named "Rick Sandford," with the boys. But at the same time, a finely wrought fiction. Sandford writes with that easy, spare, affectless style found in the best 20th century fiction. No wasted words here. Even when, near the end, one of the boys shoots him with a BB gun, the surface of the prose remains smooth and unruffled.

A clash of cultures? How else to describe a book in which the narrator, when asked by a Chassidic youth what he as a homosexual does, replies, "I’m a cocksucker"? But that makes Sandford sound like a provocateur, which he is not. He is deeply, seriously curious about, and respectful of, the boys and their culture. He genuinely wants to know, to understand how they (and their mentors and leaders and parents) can persist in what he see as such an obvious mistake: believing in God.

There are no angry, arm-waving shouting matches about religion here. Rick wants to, and does, engage the boys, and even a few of their teachers, in a dialogue about what for him are the most important questions. He has a lot of trouble with the pat, formulaic answers he gets back. But he is patient. He listens. He thinks. He buys and wears items of clothing, trying to understand. He goes to a Jewish religious supply store and gets the books the boys are studying. He reads, and he asks questions.

The boys (and their teachers) try to answer. And Rick the Writer dutifully and carefully records these exchanges.

Tensions between Rick, the boys, and the school rise and fall. When Rick is sitting outside reading, he has the habit of keeping a pair of binoculars at hand, which he uses to better perceive distant faces. This piece of equipment, together with his sexual orientation, eventually causes problems, the BB gun incident being the most overt. Until that happens, the story is carried by Rick's careful, engrossing observations and descriptions, and propelled deep into the reader's mind by his unrelenting candor.

At the end of the book, nothing is resolved. Or: everything is resolved. A school year has ended, and Rick has perhaps glimpsed a truth: the insularity that fascinated him in the boys across the street is perhaps a reflection of his own insularity. He mentions repeatedly that he has had sex with 2,000 men but has never had what he calls a relationship. In a sense, his obsessive observation of the boys, he comes to see, is an indication that he is finally beginning to grow outside of himself.

The book ends there. Rick Sandford died in 1995, leaving the manuscript for friends to shape for publication.

A dangerous, troubling work, at times funny, at times frightening. Those looking for anti-Semitism will find it. But in reality, Sandford is as appreciative of the strength and beauty of the Orthodox Jews as he is merciless in his judgment of what he perceives to be their myopia.

And hair-trigger smut-fighters will find pedophilia, though in reality there is none here. The book has no sex scenes. Yes, Rick admires the boys, talks freely about those whom he finds to be beautiful and those whom he finds to be ugly. The tone is anything but lascivious. His is rather the attitude of the wholly engaged anthropologist, the eager sociologist, and, above all, the brilliantly observant artist.