Overview
In these nine masterly stories, David Leavitt surveys the complicated politics of human relationships in families and communities, in the present day and over the course of the last century. A "wizard at blending levity and pathos" (Chicago Tribune), Leavitt displays here his characteristic grace and intelligence, as well as his remarkable candor and wit.
Here are stories that range in form from a historical survey to a police interrogation to an e-mail exchange. In "The Infection Scene," a young man's determined effort to contract HIV is juxtaposed with an account of the early life of Lord Alfred Douglas. In the title story, an expatriate tries to make sense of his ex-partner's senseless murder. In "Crossing St. Gotthard," the members of an American family traveling in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century find themselves confronting their own mortality as they plunge into a train tunnel in Switzerland. And in "Black Box," the partner of a man killed in a plane crash is drawn into an unholy alliance with a fellow "crash widow." Moving from Rome to San Francisco to Florida, from fin-de-siccle London to Hollywood in the early 1960s, these stories showcase the agility and sensitivity that have earned David Leavitt his reputation as one of the most innovative voices in contemporary short fiction.
Synopsis
In these nine masterly stories, David Leavitt surveys the complicated politics of human relationships in families and communities, in the present day and over the course of the last century. A "wizard at blending levity and pathos" (Chicago Tribune), Leavitt displays here his characteristic grace and intelligence, as well as his remarkable candor and wit.
Here are stories that range in form from a historical survey to a police interrogation to an e-mail exchange. In "The Infection Scene," a young man's determined effort to contract HIV is juxtaposed with an account of the early life of Lord Alfred Douglas. In the title story, an expatriate tries to make sense of his ex-partner's senseless murder. In "Crossing St. Gotthard," the members of an American family traveling in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century find themselves confronting their own mortality as they plunge into a train tunnel in Switzerland. And in "Black Box," the partner of a man killed in a plane crash is drawn into an unholy alliance with a fellow "crash widow." Moving from Rome to San Francisco to Florida, from fin-de-siccle London to Hollywood in the early 1960s, these stories showcase the agility and sensitivity that have earned David Leavitt his reputation as one of the most innovative voices in contemporary short fiction.
Publishers Weekly
Leavitt's nine short stories take their cue less from contemporary short-attention-span fiction and more from the stratified ironies of a Malamud or a Cheever. In "The Infection Scene," Leavitt parallels the real life of Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas ("Bosie"), with that of a fictitious but equally malign contemporary cock-teaser, Christopher, a San Francisco teen who has a romantically inaccurate fascination with getting AIDS. Although both Bosie and Christopher are walking disasters, they are also undeniably attractive, wayward na fs. Another, although lesser, naif, Ezra Hartley, is the con man in "The Black Box." Ezra comes to New York with a video he wants to sell the networks, showing footage of a plane that has just exploded on the way to England and the troop of school kids who were on board. He enlists Bob Bookman, a native New Yorker whose lover was also killed in the crash, to help him, drawing him deeply into a clockwork-perfect dance of delusion and lust. In the title story, the narrator, Vincent Burke, gives details of the life of his ex-lover, Tom, to two Roman carabinieri after Tom is found murdered. Although Tom's murder isn't solved in the story, the enigmas in his life from his friendship with patronizing "liberal" straight couples in San Francisco to his late-blooming obsession with marble in Rome become clearer. This story is infused with an anger that exists, like a lit fuse, just below its dense writerliness. Straining to contain his sense of the outrages of gay history beneath the luster of an accomplished style, Leavitt achieves an electric narrative energy. Author tour. (Sept. 4) Forecast: Though smaller in scope than Leavitt's recent novel, Martin Bauman;or, A Sure Thing, this is a more surefooted and emotionally complex effort and should please gay and straight readers alike. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.