From Publishers Weekly
The literary life is given a sound drubbing in this comedy of egos and coming-of-age tale by Leavitt (The Page Turner; While England Sleeps) set in the 1980s of Reaganomics and the dawn of AIDS. Always "ready to pounce on a sure thing," as a classmate describes him, ambitious, gay Martin Bauman, part calculating and part ingenuous, decides in college that he will be a successful novelist and sets out with considerable luck and adroitness to achieve his goal in the New York literary world. Along the way, he meets up with a veritable catalogue of young urban literary types, most notably Liza, a self-centered young novelist who can't decide if she's gay or straight, and Liza's wealthy, dilettantish best friend, Eli, another writer and Martin's primary love interest. The vagaries of Martin's personal relationships, however, are fairly commonplace, much less entertaining than his turbulent professional ascent. Readers hip to the New York book biz will be tickled throughout by Leavitt's thinly veiled satiric references to various literary institutions. In his unnamed eastern urban college, Martin studies under Stanley Flint, a writer, editor and teacher whose eccentricities, power and drive make him a ringer for famed maverick editor Gordon Lish. While still an undergraduate, Martin is lucky enough to publish a story in an unnamed prestigious weekly magazine, probably the New Yorker. After graduation, Martin works for a venerable independent publisher whose adherence to intellectual standards in the face of financial troubles should be easy for readers to identify. Packed with gossipy detail and yet curiously detached in tone, the novel seems part sociological excavation, part intellectual soap opera. Though Martin inflicts at least as much damage as he suffers himself, he is an appealing antihero, inhabiting as he does a world where, as Leavitt eloquently and searingly demonstrates, there is no such thing as a "sure thing." 10-city author tour. (Sept.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Leavitt's latest is a fictionalized memoir of a young writer's coming of age. While family plays a part, this is a more or less chronological recounting of the protagonist's coming east to attend a prestigious university, studying under the legendary editor Stanley Flint, moving to New York, and accepting his sexuality and early forays into dating and securing a lover. In part, the book reads like an old-fashioned roman ? clef, and fun can admittedly be had figuring out who is whom. In Martin, Leavitt creates a character whose literary talent and ambitions are not necessarily at odds with but certainly outstrip his ability to create a life that is either personally, sexually, or romantically fulfilling. Martin's social fumblingsApresented with characteristic deftness and honestyAare often poignant and funny, and Leavitt's portrait of a time and place are masterly. Nevertheless, the overall effect is surprisingly cool and distant. For this readerAan admitted fan of Leavitt's fictionAthe decision to present this material as a novel is squarely unsatisfying. Granted that the line between fiction and memoir is less clear now than ever before, one still wishes that Leavitt had thrown aside the pretense of fiction and presented us with a work as creatively conceived and emotionally intense as Martin Amis's Experience. Until then, one should stick to Leavitt's novels, where life enters art more obliquely.-ABrian Kenney, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Martin Bauman, the gay writer protagonist of Leavitt's self-referential novel, has not even come out to himself let alone his parents or friends when he enters college in 1980. Happiest in the company of lesbians and seemingly immune to lust or love, he assiduously cultivates his literary ambitions under the brutal tutelage of professor Stanley Flint, who warns him that his need for approval and preference for "a sure thing" could turn him into a mere hack. Flint continues to be his nemesis even after Martin achieves instant fame by disclosing his homosexuality in the first "gay" short story ever published in the New York literary magazine, and Martin, analyzing himself two decades later, acknowledges Flint's prescience as he relates, in detail both mesmerizing and maddening, the story of his early success and rapid comeuppance. Tirelessly chronicling his chatty and competitive relationships with other egotistical gay and lesbian writers, discouraging work as a publisher's slush-pile reader, attendance at dull literary soirees, and late-blooming eroticism, Martin ultimately reveals the many ways his profound disconnection from himself and others caused pain and threatened to undermine his talent. Leavitt, who writes with acumen and enough sparkle to lighten his potentially stifling literary preoccupations, has deliberately sacrificed his young self on the altar of fiction in order to mock the pretensions, provinciality, and venality of the New York literary world, to offer his apologies for past transgressions, and to praise literature and the radiance it bestows. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
"...intelligent, funny, and genuinely revealing."


Review
"...intelligent, funny, and genuinely revealing."


Book Description
David Leavitt's deliciously sharp new novel is a multilayered dissection of literary and sexual mores in the get-ahead eighties, when outrageous success lay seductively within reach of any young writer ambitious enough to grab it. At the dawn of the Reagan era, Martin Bauman -- nineteen, clever, talented, and insecure -- is enrolled at a prestigious college with a hard-won place under the tutelage of the legendary and enigmatic Stanley Flint, a man who can make or break careers with the flick of a weary hand. Martin is poised on the brink of the writing life, and his twin desires, equally urgent, are to get into print and find his way out of the closet. As he makes his way through the wilderness of New York -- falling in love, going to parties, and coming to terms with the emerging chaos of AIDS -- Martin matures from brilliant student, to apprentice in a Manhattan publishing house, to one of the golden few to be anointed by the highly regarded magazine in which it is every young writer's dream to be published. Yet despite his apparent success, his emotional and creative desires stubbornly refuse to be satisfied, and his every achievement is haunted by that austere and troubling image of literary perfection, his elusive mentor, Stanley Flint. An irresistibly entertaining epic, erotic, honest, and funny, MARTIN BAUMAN lays bare the life of the artist, in all his venal, envious, poignant glory.


About the Author
David Leavitt's first collection of stories, Family Dancing, was published when he was just twenty-three and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Faulkner Prize. The Lost Language of Cranes was made into a BBC film, and While England Sleeps was short-listed for the Los Angeles Times Fiction Prize. With Mark Mitchell, he coedited The Penguin Book of Short Stories, Pages Passed from Hand to Hand, and cowrote Italian Pleasures. Leavitt is a recipient of fellowships from both the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Italy.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Flint"s First PrincipleI first met Stanley Flint in the winter of 1980, when I was nineteen. He was between editorial greatnesses then, just fired by the famous magazine but not yet hired by the famous publisher. To earn his keep he traveled from university to university, offering his famous Seminar on the Writing of Fiction, which took place one night a week and lasted for four hours. Wild rumors circulated about this seminar. It was said that at the beginning of the term he made his students write down their deepest, darkest, dirtiest secrets and then read them aloud one by one. It was said that he asked if they would be willing to give up a limb in order to write a line as good as the opening of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It was said that he carried a pistol and shot it off every time a student read what he considered to be a formidable sentence. As the former fiction editor of Broadway magazine, Flint was already notorious in those days, though his notoriety was of an oddly secondary variety, the result of his having published, during his tenure there, the first stories of some writers who had gone on to become great - so great, in fact, that their blazing aureoles shone backwards, as it were, illuminating the face of Flint the Discoverer, Flint the Seer, who had had the acumen not only to recognize genius in its rawest form, but to pluck it from the heap, nurture it, refine it. Soon he had such a reputation that it was claimed he needed only to make a phone call and a writer would have a publishing contract, just like that - until the editor in chief of Broadway, either from jealousy or because Flint had had an affair with his secretary (it depended who you asked), fired him. Much media uproar followed but no job offers, and Flint went to work as a teacher, in which role he cultivated an aura of mystic authority; for instance, he was supposed to have gotten one of his students a six-figure advance on the basis of a single paragraph, which was probably the real reason why three hundred people had applied for the fifteen places in his class. I remember vividly the room in which that seminar took place. Located just off the informal library of one of the dormitories, it was oblong and narrow, with wheezing radiators and shelves full of books too obscure or valueless even to bother cataloguing. On the chalkboard - left over from an Italian class that had met earlier in the day - the conjugation of the verb mangiare was written in a tidy hand. Because I had arrived twenty minutes early the first evening, only one other person was seated at the battered oak table, a girl with circular glasses and tight blond braids, her attention scowlingly focused on some German worksheets. Not wanting to appear idle in the presence of such industry, I busied myself arranging my coat and scarves over the back of a chair (it was January), then, pulling a book at random from one of the shelves, sat down and started to read it. The book was called Dawn to Sunset, and it had been published in 1904. On the title page its author had written the following inscription: "Con molto affetto, from one who spent his formative years "neath thy Ivied walls, James Egbert Hillman, "89. Sorrento." "Florence!" the first chapter began.Flinging open the curtains, Dick Dandridge stared wonderingly at the piazza in morning light. Such a buzz of activity! It was market day, and at little stalls old women in black dresses were selling apples and potatoes. Two horses with caps on their ears pulled a wine cart past the picturesque medieval church. Italy, Dick thought, remembering, for a moment, his mother weeping as his ship set sail from New York, and then his adventures in London, in Paris, at the customs house in Chiasso. He could not wait to get out into it, and pulling his nightshirt over his head, he called out to his friend Thornley, "Get up, slug-a-bed! We"ve Florence to see!" A Hispanic girl with bangs and acne on her forehead now came in and took a seat; then a pair of boys, in avid conversation; then a boy with a withered arm whom I recognized from a class on modern poetry the semester before. We saluted each other vaguely. The girl with the braids and the big glasses put away her worksheets. A conversation started. Over the voices of Dick Dandridge and his friend Thornley, one of the pair of boys said, "I wasn"t on the list, but I"m hoping he"ll let me in anyway." (At this last remark I smiled privately. Though only a sophomore, I was on the list.) The boy who had said this, I observed, was handsome, older than I, with wire-rimmed spectacles and a two-days" growth of beard; it pleased me to think that Stanley Flint had preferred my submission to his. And meanwhile every seat but one had been taken; students were sitting on the floor, sitting on their backpacks, leaning against the shelves. Then Stanley Flint himself strode through the door, and all conversation ceased. There was no mistaking him. Tall and limping, with wild dark hair and a careful, gray-edged beard, he carried a whiff of New York into the room, a scent of steam rising through subway grates which made me shudder with longing. Bearing a wine-colored leather briefcase with brass locks, dressed in a gray suit, striped tie, and fawn trench coat that, as he sat down, he took off and flung dramatically over the back of his chair, he seemed the embodiment of all things remote and glamorous, an urban adulthood to which I aspired but had not the slightest idea how to reach. Even his polished cane, even his limp - like everything about Flint, its origins were a source of speculation and wild stories - spoke to me of worldliness and glamour and the illicit. He did not greet us. Instead, opening his briefcase, he took out a yellow legal pad, a red pencil, and a copy of the list of students he had accepted for the seminar. "Which one of you is Lopez?" he asked, scanning the list. "You?" (He was looking at the girl with bangs and bad skin.) "No, I"m Joyce Mittman," the girl said. "Then you must be Lopez." (This time he addressed her neighbor, another Hispanic girl, her hair cut short like a swimmer"s.) "No, I"m Acosta," the neighbor said. A low murmur of laughter now circulated - one in which Flint"s raspy baritone did not take part. Looking up, he settled his gaze on a tall, elegant young woman in a cowl-neck sweater who was standing in the corner. She was the only other Hispanic in the room. "Then you must be Lopez," he said triumphantly. The girl did not smile. "Did you get my note?" she asked. "Did you bring the story?" he answered. She nodded. "Over here, over here." Flint tapped the table. Extracting some pages from her backpack, Lopez walked to the front of the room and handed them over. Flint put on a pair of tortoiseshell half-glasses. He read. After less than half a minute, he put the pages down. "No, no, I"m sorry," he said, giving them back to her. "This is crap. You will never be a writer. Please leave." "But you"ve only -" "Please leave." Lopez wheezed. A sort of rictus seemed to have seized her - and not only her, but me, the other students, the room itself. In the high tension of the moment, no one moved or made a sound, except for Flint, who scribbled blithely on his legal pad. "Is something wrong?" he asked. The question broke the spell, unpalsied poor Lopez, who stuffed the crumpled pages into her backpack and made for the door, slamming it behind her as she went. "In case you were wondering what happened," Flint said, continuing to scribble, "Miss Lopez sent me a note requesting that I look at her story tonight, as she had missed the submission deadline. I agreed to do so. Unfortunately I did not think the story to be worthy." Gazing up from his pad, he counted with his index finger. "And now I see that there are twenty - twenty-two people in this room. As I recall I selected only fifteen students for the class. I would appreciate it if those of you whose names were not on the list would please leave now, quietly, and without creating a spectacle of the sort that we have just witnessed from Miss Lopez." Several people bolted. Again Flint counted. Nineteen of us remained. "I should tell you now," Flint said, "that the stories you submitted, to a one, were shit, though those written by the fifteen of you whom I selected at least showed conviction - a wisp of truth here or there. As for the rest, you are courageous to have stuck it out, I"ll give you that, and as courage is the one virtue every fiction writer must possess in spades, I shall let you stay - that is, if you still feel inclined after I tell you what I expect of you." Then he stood and began to speak. He spoke for two hours. So began life with Stanley Flint. I"m sorry to say I don"t remember much of what he said that evening, though I do retain a general impression of being stirred, even awed; he was a marvelous raconteur, and could keep us rapt all evening with his monologues, which often ranged far afield from the topic at hand. Indeed, today I regret that unlike the girl with the braids - her name, I soon learned, was Baylor - I never took notes during class. Otherwise I"d have before me a detailed record of what Flint had to tell us those nights, rather than merely the memory of a vague effulgence out of the haze of which an aphorism occasionally emerges, fresh and entire. For instance: "The greatest sin you can commit as a writer is to put yourself in a position of moral superiority to your characters." (Though I have never ceased to trumpet this rule, I have often broken it.) Or: "People forgive genius everything except success." Or: "Remember that when you ask someone to read a story you"ve written, you"re asking that person to give you a piece of his life. Minutes - hours - of his life." (The gist of this idea was expressed by "Flint"s first principle," of which Flint"s first principle was exemplary: "Get on with it!") It was all a great change from the only other writing class I"d ever taken, a summer poetry workshop sponsored by the Seattle junior college - a remnant of sixties idealism, all pine trees and octagons - where my mother had once gone to hear lectures on Proust. Of this workshop (the word in itself is revealing) I was the only male member. Our teacher, a young woman whose watery blond hair reached nearly to her knees, imparted to the proceedings the mildewy perfume of group therapy, at once confessional and pious. Often class was held outdoors, on a lawn spattered with pine needles, which is perhaps why my memory has subsequently condensed that entire series of afternoons into the singular image of one of my classmates, a heavy girl with red spectacle-welts on her nose, standing before us in the sunlight and reading a poem of which only one line -"the yellow flows from me, a river"- remains, the words themselves flowing from her sad mouth in a repetitive drone, like a river without source or end. Flint"s seminar, to say the least, had a different rhythm. It worked like this: at the beginning of each session a student would be asked to read aloud from his or her work. The student would then read one sentence. If Flint liked the sentence, the student would be allowed to continue; if he did not, however - and this was much more common - the student would be cut off, shut up, sent to the corner. A torrent of eloquence would follow, the ineffectuality of this slight undergraduate effort providing an occasion for Flint to hold forth dazzlingly, and about anything at all. His most common complaint was that the sentence amounted to "baby talk" or "throat-clearing"- this latter accusation almost invariably followed by the invocation "Remember Flint"s first principle!" and from us, the responsorial chant, "Get on with it!" Soon we understood that Flint loathed "boyfriend stories," stories in which the protagonist was a writer, stories set in restaurants or cocktail lounges. To cocktail lounges he showed a particular aversion: any story set in a cocktail lounge would provoke from him a wail of lamentation, delivered in a voice both stentorian and grave, a sermon-izer"s voice, for the truth was, there was something deeply ministerial about Flint. Meanwhile the student whose timid words had provoked this outpouring would have no choice but to sit and percolate, humiliated, occasionally letting out little gasps of self-defense, which Flint would immediately quash. An atmosphere of hyperventilation ensued. The windows steamed. Those Flint had maligned stared at him, choking on the sentences in which, a moment earlier, they had taken such pride, and which he was now shoving back down their throats. Yet when, on occasion, he did like a sentence - or even more rarely, when he allowed a student to move from the first sentence to the second, or from the second to the third - it was as if a window had been thrown open, admitting a breath of air into the churning humidity of that room, and yet a breath that would cool the face of the chosen student only, bathing him or her in the delightful breeze of laudation, while outside its influence the rest of us sweltered, wiping our noses, mopping our brows. Sometimes he even let his favorites - of whom Baylor, the girl with the braids, soon became the exemplar - read a story all the way to the end. On these occasions the extravagance of Flint"s praise more than matched the barbarity of his deprecation. Not content merely to pay homage, he would seem actually to bow down before the author, assuming the humble posture of a supplicant. "I"m honored," he"d say, "I"m moved," while the student in question glanced away, embarrassed. We all knew that his adulation, at such moments, was over the top - a reflection, perhaps, of the depth to which his passions ran, or else part of a strategy intended to make us feel as if his approval were something on which our very lives depended. Still, he was nothing if not consistent. Whether delivering tirade or paean, he never wavered from his literary ethos, at the core of which lay the belief that all human experiences, no matter how different they might seem on the surface, shared a common grounding. This theme ("Flint"s second principle") he trumpeted at every opportunity. To perceive something one had gone through as particular or special, he kept telling us, was to commit not merely an error, but a sin against art. On the other hand, by admitting the commonality that binds us all, not only might we win from readers the precious tremor of empathy that precedes faith, we might also near, as we could from no other direction, that mercurial yet unwavering goal: the truth. In retrospect, I wonder at my ability not only to survive, but to thrive under such circumstances. Twenty years later I"m more sensitive rather than less, more cowardly, less likely to consider the ordeal of Flint"s criticism worth enduring. I feel sympathetic toward poor Lopez in a way that I didn"t then. Also, so many people have studied with Flint since 1980 that by now his detractors far outnumber his supporters, among whom - with some reservations - I count myself. According to these detractors, Flint was nothing but a bully, a petty dictator, his classes the ritual induction ceremonies of the cult over which he presided, like a fat little demigod. For what, after all, was this alternation of upbraiding with intemperate homage that he practiced, if not the very essence of brainwashing? Yes, to his detractors Flint would never be more than a mountebank, a literary equivalent of Werner Erhard, the self-help guru who in the late seventies stripped his would-be disciples of their wristwatches and forbade them to go to the bathroom. Nor can I deny the legitimacy of their complaints, for he did all the things of which they accuse him. And yet - how else to say it? - he was great. And if greatness, these days, arouses suspicion, if not outright hostility, simply by making itself felt, perhaps this is because great men and women are rarely nice, and often capricious; or because something in the very nature of democracy chafes at the idea of too much greatness residing within a single human frame, instead of being placed at the center of the arena to be fought over; or because greatness demands of us that we reconsider, and possibly revise, the very terms according to which we define our humanity - a task from which mediocrity, by its very nature, cowers. His detractors are right to describe Stanley Flint as the leader of a cult. They are wrong in assuming that it was a cult of personality. If Flint was a missionary, then literature was his deity. "You"ll never meet anyone who takes writing more seriously than I do," he told me once. He was right. I never have. Of himself, on the other hand, I am convinced that he thought very little. This became more and more obvious as the semester proceeded. The third week, for instance, he arrived in class red-faced and winded, wearing black boots and a Heathcliffish cape. "Children," he said, limping to the table and opening his briefcase, "I have a special treat for you tonight," then went on to explain that he had just received some pages from the novel on which Leonard Trask - the great writer he had discovered a decade ago, when Trask was still a mineworker in Montana - had been at work for the past ten years. And these pages, for our delight as well as our edification, he was now going to read aloud to us, a rare privilege, as even Trask"s publisher had not yet seen them. I remember wondering, that night, at Flint"s cape. Certainly it contributed to the element of theatricality that underlay his performance, a quality of spectacle with which Flint invested all his readings, but particularly those of the writers he had discovered, or whose work he revered. Diction precise, voice rapturous, he offered us Trask"s finely tuned sentences as if each were a delicacy, a slice of white truffle, or a toast point spread with caviar. Indeed, so sumptuous was his delivery that today I recall nothing of the reading itself. Instead it is only the voice of the caped orator that resonates, a voice so charismatic that it seemed to eclipse everything around it: our faces, the snow outside the window, even the novel-forever-in-progress that had occasioned it. Another recollection: one particularly cold, blizzardy night, Flint brought in a copy of some literary quarterly - I forget which one - and thrust it in front of our faces. "Do you know this magazine?" he asked, pointing at the matte white cover, which was already smudged with fingerprint-shaped patches of New York Times ink. We did not. "I"m going to read you a story I"ve had occasion to see here recently," Flint went on, "because I want to know, honestly, what you think of it." And he began to read. One sentence, two sentences. He stopped. "No, no," he said, shaking his head. "All wrong. No life. Take this as a lesson, children. The language is being mangled, not caressed. And this sort of thing appears all the time in our better literary journals." We stayed silent. Clearing his throat, he read another sentence - and stopped again. "You see?" he said. "It is in your eyes. The story has failed to captivate. It has failed to seduce. I wrote this," he added casually, slipping the magazine back into his briefcase as a rattle of surprise passed through the room. For up until that moment, we had not known that Flint himself was a writer. The next morning, I looked up his name in the periodicals index at the library. It turned out that he had published a dozen stories over the past decade, all of them in obscure journals with tiny print runs, none in the great organs of culture in which the work of his disciples regularly appeared. Of the stories themselves - all of which I dug out and read - I remember few details. Most of them were not even stories so much as brief bits of language torture, congested, constipated even, and redolent of some long and futile labor - as if the sentences had been subjected to such anguished revision, worked over so many times, that they had finally expired from the effort. Then, for the first time, I felt that I understood Stanley Flint. Far from some disinterested nurturer, he was a literary Tantalus, from whose dry and reaching lips that flow of eloquence, a single taste of which would have satiated him, forever bent away. Yes, his was the cruel position of the high priest who finds himself envying the very God it is his sacred duty to cultivate; and yet who can say whether this envy is not itself intended to be the ultimate test of his faith?Although in memory those hours I spent under Flint"s tutelage have now bloated to the point that they seem to obliterate everything else I did and thought that semester, the truth is that every day except Wednesday (when the seminar met) I was leading the typically desultory life of the undergraduate, in which Flint played no part; that is to say, I went to class, I studied, I brooded over futile crushes, I ate my dinners and breakfasts in the dining hall, I had friends. Never in my life have I had so many friends. Lately I"ve come to believe that the process of growing older is essentially one of ruthless and continual editing, so that the novel of one"s experience - at nineteen a huge and undisciplined mess, heavily annotated, the pages out of sequence - will by forty have resolved itself into a fairly conventional tale of provincial life, and by sixty be reduced to one of those incisive, "minimalist" works in which irony and wordplay displace "plot" (a word I put in quotation marks because Flint loathed it). Thus at thirty-eight I travel in a comparatively restricted circle. At nineteen, on the other hand, I had dozens of friends, and more than that, I looked upon every one of them as a potential intimate. Occasionally, during those abundant days, I would run into my classmates from Flint"s seminar. Mittman was one of the servers in my dining hall - she"d barely nod at me as she spooned eggs Florentine (hard-boiled eggs with spinach, and not Florentine at all) onto my plate. Baylor and I were taking the same big lecture course on the art of the Italian Renaissance. We used to encounter each other in the dimly lit gallery wherein were hung reproductions of the paintings and sculptures the titles and locations of which we were supposed to memorize for our midterm. In the gloomy silence she"d sometimes cast me a conspiratorial glance, as if we were members of one of the secret societies that flourished on the campus. Once, at an informational meeting about an internship at a New York publishing house for which I wanted to apply, I even ran into Lopez. Legs crossed, dressed as before in a sleek cowl-neck sweater, she sat across the table from me and took notes, her face a study of elegant composure. Yet when I smiled at her, she turned away, refusing so much as to meet my glance. Still, despite all this activity, Wednesday nights remained the epicenter of my life that semester, the black hole into which all the other days and nights collapsed. In part this was due to anxiety. The term was nearly half over, and I still hadn"t managed to get past the first sentence with Flint. "Bauman, Bauman, Bauman," he"d wail whenever I started to read, and cover his head with his hands. It seemed I was making the same mistake over and over: I kept trying to write about my mother, who was at that time undergoing radiation therapy treatments for cancer, and I couldn"t get it right. Every sentence had to do with lumps: ""Feel my lumps," my mother says to my father" is one example. "You"re playing for sympathy," Flint would tell me whenever I read these sentences. "You want us to feel sorry for you. See? We don"t." Finally I decided to change my tactics. I"d recently read an article about a couple called Bo and Peep, who would later become the founders of the notorious Heaven"s Gate cult. At the time, however, they were just another pair of late-seventies lunatics, wandering through the Midwest and soliciting disciples to go with them to some spot in the desert where a spaceship was supposed to pick them up. In their rather pathetic (and surprisingly successful) efforts to enlist followers, I sensed the possibility of a story, the heroine of which would be my oldest aunt, Lily, who shocks her family by deciding to run off with Bo and Peep, whom I renamed FeeFi and FoFum. Lily, already in her eighties by this time, and living in a Florida retirement community, I called Bessie, and repatriated to the Brooklyn of her youth. That Wednesday I hoped Flint wouldn"t call on me. I didn"t think I was ready yet. Also, I had a good feeling about the story and wanted to wait until it was finished before I shared it. As it turned out, however, I had nothing to worry about, for when Flint stormed into class - late, for the first time all semester, and clutching a mass of documents in his fist - it was obvious that something momentous (and probably terrible) had occurred. "I"m sorry to have kept you waiting," he said, throwing off his coat. "I don"t know if you"ve heard what"s happened . . ." We said nothing. Clearly no one had. "Children, I arrived this evening on the campus of your great university, full of beans, eager to see every one of you," he continued. "Little did I imagine that upon stepping into my office I would be confronted with this"- he indicated the documents -"a situation the likes of which, in my wildest dreams, I could never have imagined. I"m deeply bereaved. I"m also outraged. Especially after last week, when Baylor delighted us so much with her marvelous story . . ." Again, silence. Sitting down, he thrust a heavy hand through his dark hair. "And to think that just a few hours ago . . . And now this horror, this sickening slander . . ." "What happened?" Mittman asked meekly. It turned out that Lopez - the same Lopez whose work he had so efficiently decimated the first night of class, and whom I had only a few days ago encountered at the internship meeting - had lodged a formal complaint against him, of which he had been apprised only that evening. Her affidavit, phrased in the acid, impersonal language of lawsuits, he now read aloud, holding it away from his face as if it were literally noxious. My impression was that more than anything else, the writing itself wounded him, for what was this affidavit but that story that most offended his delicate sensibilities, the story that lied, that put itself in a position of moral superiority to its characters, that failed to recognize the commonality of the human condition: in short, the very story Lopez had handed him our first evening, and that he was now finding himself obliged - bullied, even - to read through to the end? Alas, the bullying worked. For the moment, at least, Lopez triumphed. According to her affidavit, Flint had glanced first at Mitt-man, then at Acosta, then at her, and said, "You wetbacks all look alike to me." "A gross libel!" he shouted now, throwing down the pages. "I never said such a thing!" Mittman affirmed that he had not. Acosta seconded. "How can literature survive in such an atmosphere? Ah, children, how numerous are the enemies of the imagination - and in what guises of piety they clothe themselves! The literal is never the truth. Take this down. The literal blinds us. The facts do not speak." He wiped his eyes. He looked - this man who craved only the purest water - as if he had just been forced to swallow a gallon of bile. "To make such an accusation against me - me, of all people," he went on, "I, who have always been the greatest advocate of tolerance, who has suffered himself bigotry the likes of which, children, I pray you shall never know! Anyone could tell you that. I was in Selma, for God"s sake. I was arrested in Selma. The record proves it. I published the first story by a black woman ever to appear in Broadway, and it was a hell of a struggle to get it through. And that woman was Nancy Coleridge. She was on welfare. In Cincinnati, on welfare. And now look at her - they say she may get the Nobel Prize, for Christ"s sake! This complaint of Miss Lopez"s, this is not a crime against me personally, this is not about me personally, this is a crime against art. For what has she done but use language - our most precious asset - to level a blow at freedom?" Someone lit a cigarette. The boy with the spectacles offered to fetch Flint a cocktail from his room. He refused. Needless to say, no one read that night. Instead Flint talked. He talked and talked. First he said he was going to resign. Then he swore he would never again set foot on the campus of our university. We pleaded with him to reconsider. We offered to write letters, to start a petition. He kept shaking his head. I think he rather enjoyed being the object of our entreaties. Finally he thanked and dismissed us, promising to mull the situation over before making a final decision. For the first and last time all term, the seminar let out early. The process by which all of this was resolved - of which I learned the details only several months later - was as follows: after class that evening, Mittman and Acosta paid an unannounced visit to Lopez in her dormitory, dismissing her roommate peremptorily. Behind locked doors, the three of them then spoke heatedly for several hours, emerging, according to a witness, only around sunrise, arm in arm, tears in their eyes: a photo op for sisterhood. That morning, accompanied by her new friends, Lopez officially withdrew her complaint against Stanley Flint. The next week he was back, as volatile and jubilant as ever. No allusion was made to the black events of the previous Wednesday. For several sessions he oscillated in his usual way between approbation and decimation, while I, uncalled upon, labored privately at my story about Aunt Lily. Progress was slow; by spring break I still hadn"t finished. Instead of going home to California I decided to stay on campus, where every afternoon I holed up in the rear smoking section of the undergraduate library. Most of my companions there were lesbians, some with rings in their noses, all followers of one or another of the fashionable theorists of the moment, and at work on long essays or theses. To my left Gretchen, a deconstructionist, wrote about Jane Austen; to my right Schuyler, a Lacanian feminist, toiled away on Melanie Klein. I ground out my story. Spring break ended. Classmates I didn"t like returned, bronzed and fit after vacations in Florida, while the lesbians, their skin library-pallid, smoked and wrote and ignored them. I finished my story, then stayed up most of Tuesday night typing, so that I could bring it to class the next evening. It was now April - the sort of April we see less and less these days, during which winter, like an obstinate old tenant, refuses to leave, even as spring tries over and over again to evict her. No sooner would tiny buds have appeared on the trees than a biting wind would have whipped up, shriveling these nubs of life before they could flower. Or I"d be sunning one day with my friends on the lawn in front of the library, when suddenly rain would start to fall, and within a few hours a blizzard would blanket the fresh grass with snow. A perpetual sludge of muddy ice made the flagstones treacherous. The night I read aloud for the seminar, because I had on the wrong shoes, I slipped on the way, tearing a hole in the knee of my jeans. My eastern classmates, all of whom owned more appropriate footwear, laughed at me when I entered the seminar room. Every sign for success seemed inauspicious. Then Flint limped into class with his briefcase, his smell of subways. "Good to see you all again," he said gruffly, unwinding his long cashmere scarf in a way that meant business. No preludes, no reading from newly received galleys. "Well, who are we going to hear from tonight?" I raised my hand. "All right, Bauman. Wow us." He sat back. Baylor crossed her arms and stared at me. "Aunt Bessie was thirty when my father was born," I read, "the first son at last after nine daughters." I paused, taking it for granted, after so many failed efforts, that Flint would now interrupt me, shake his head, mutter, "Bauman, Bauman, Bauman." Instead he said, "Go on." I looked up. My heart began to race. "His birth was a relief to my grandparents," I read, "who could finally stop conceiving." He smiled. "Go on." I went on. I read the entire story - all thirty-five pages. It took almost an hour. By the time I"d finished rain had started outside, and Flint was still smiling. "Who"d have ever thought," he said, "that something like this would come from Bauman?" I think I almost fainted. It was as if, with a single gesture, Flint had swept away winter. Suddenly I danced in a spring glade. His words flowed around and over and through me. I caught nothing of their meaning. Instead (as I am told is the case with dogs) it was the cadences of his approval, the intonations of his praise, that warmed and restored me. From that evening on, I was his favorite; and not merely a favorite, but the favorite among favorites. Like the snow itself, my anxiety melted and was gone. It was as if, having written such a story, I"d been absolved (at least by myself) of that necessity to win Flint over that had driven me since the beginning of the term. Freed from pressure, I came to class laughing, and always took the seat directly to his left. Now, I think, is the moment to make certain confessions regarding my character, then and now. For all my awkwardness as a young man, my timidity, that tendency to feel ill at ease among strangers which had made me so shy the first night of Flint"s seminar, I was (and am) both ambitious and competitive. What I craved, more than anything else, was success, a word that in my mind I took to be synonymous with "approval." The origins of this misapprehension I shall explore in greater detail later on. Suffice it to say, for now, that as early as my freshman year, I had a reputation among my peers for being both arrogant and opportunistic: a reputation, moreover, which, though the natural result of my loud and occasionally obnoxious comportment, could not have been more at odds with the image that I cultivated of myself, as sincere, generous, and above all guileless. I didn"t recognize, in other words, the degree to which my desire to please dictated not only my conduct, but the very approach I took to writing, which even then I considered my métier. Thus you may recall that earlier, when describing the process by which I came to write the story with which I eventually won Stanley Flint"s heart, I said, without even being conscious of it, that at a certain point I decided to "change my tactics." Tactics, more than I care to admit today, dictated my decision to write that particular story. Above all else, I wanted to please my teacher. I was a revolting example of the "teacher"s pet." I must have been unbearable. For instance, a few weeks after my triumph with Flint, I was reading aloud from a new story, a slapdash thing that I considered to be extremely funny - so funny that halfway through I broke into a fit of debilitating laughter. "I"m sorry," I spluttered, putting down my pages. No one else was laughing. "It"s all right," Flint said coolly. "I always enjoy the spectacle of a writer amusing himself." (It is a testament to my denseness that I took this remark as a compliment.) Shortly after this episode he assigned us one of his rare in-class exercises: each of us was to write a one-sentence description of someone else in the room, then read it aloud, after which the rest of us would try to guess who it was that was being described. I have no memory of what I wrote myself that night. What I do recall is that Mittman described a very beautiful girl named Thompson (with Flint we were all on a last-name basis) as "silvery"; also, that the boy with the wire-rimmed spectacles, when his turn came, described someone as being "ready to pounce on a sure thing." At first I couldn"t imagine to whom he was referring, until Baylor said, "That"s Bauman." A murmur of concurrence followed. "Bauman," the choristers repeated. And Flint agreed: "No doubt about it. Bauman." Ready to pounce on a sure thing. When I was a child the boys at my bus stop used to call out "Faggot!" as I approached in the morning with my lunch box. Just as they intuited from my behavior - in particular, from the ways I interacted with them - a facet of my identity of which I myself was still unconscious, so the boy with the spectacles, with that uncanny prescience of peers, had detected a strain of ruthlessness in my character that would later blossom into fanatical professionalism, but remained for the moment, as it were, latent, unbudded. For I had a lot invested, in those years, in an idea of myself as innocent and goodhearted; nor was I far off the mark, since the truth is, ruthlessness of the sort I displayed can derive from innocence and goodheartedness; specifically, the innocent, goodhearted craving of the child for adult approval. The boy with the spectacles attracted and scared me. I"m sorry to say that today I don"t remember his name, even though I often thought about him then, in particular about the way his chest hair - the color of champagne - seemed literally to bubble out of the collar of his sweater. A few years later I ran into him in New York, and he told me almost boastfully that after class that first night Flint had approached him to find out where on campus he might go to get some "pussy." That was the word he used: "pussy." Our conversation left me with the impression that between him and Flint there had developed one of those buddyish intimacies to which the joint pursuit of women lends an erotic edge. I pictured them prowling the campus like male dogs who have picked up the scent of a female in heat, an image the contemplation of which left me feeling emasculated, excluded, and faintly aroused. I suppose now that I was a little in love with Flint. And why shouldn"t I have been? He was a good-looking man, lean and surly, with hands like broken-in leather gloves. Nor did his reputation as a womanizer in any way detract from the effect he had on me. On the contrary, it served only to intensify my idea of him as an avatar of masculine virility. For what I wanted from Flint, I told myself, wasn"t so much sex as permission - to write, to think of myself as a writer. Today I recognize the degree to which this need for his approbation encoded a desire I had heretofore never admitted: the desire for men - and more specifically, for older, fatherly men who didn"t desire me. (About this desire I felt a sense of shame that persisted even after I had come out, leading me to pretend that I was attracted to "nice" boys my own age, instead of the burly men in their thirties and forties who figured in my daydreams.) A long time later, when I was living with Eli Aronson, and having always to come up with new sexual fantasies by means of which I could maintain the façade of mutual lust upon which our relationship depended, I started for the first time to have explicitly sexual thoughts about my former teacher. Giving Eli a blowjob in his loft on Elizabeth Street, I"d find myself back to my college dorm room. It would be late at night - Wednesday night - and someone would be knocking at the door. I"d answer. "Bauman, Bauman," Flint would say, "I"m desperate. I can"t find any pussy." And I would invite him in, sit him down on the bed (he would require help with his bad leg), undo his pants, and take his penis - long, I imagined, and not terribly hard, though ruddy - into my mouth . . . What was exciting to me about this fantasy (and what made it one of the ones, in those years, on which I could count even when all else failed to carry me through the bouts of fretful lovemaking on which Eli and I so perversely staked our happiness) was the fact that in it, Flint showed no sexual interest whatsoever in me. Instead I was only a last-ditch alternative, a cavity into which he might pour his overarching need for that realm of feminine receptivity to which the boy with the spectacles had alluded when he"d used the word "pussy." "Help me out, Bauman," Flint would say in this fantasy: never "I want you" or "I love you." That would have spoiled everything. Indeed, if someone had told me that Flint was secretly homosexual, or that he was in love with one of the boys in the class, I think I would have lost all respect (not to mention desire) for him, instead of living, as I did, for the day when he might let me call him mentor. As for his real life - his life in New York - I knew almost nothing. That he was married and had several children, one a sophomore at my university, I had divined from casual references he"d made during class. The names of these children, however, he never shared, just as he refused to give us (or anyone) his home address and phone number. Like many great and neurotic men, he had a persecution complex, and feared lest some madman - probably a writer whose stories he had refused to publish in Broadway - should track him down and shoot him in his bed. Even murkier were the details of his early years. For example, though it was assumed from a certain lilt in his accent that he was southern, no one I asked seemed to have any idea where exactly he"d grown up, where (or whether) he"d gone to college. Baylor said she"d heard that "Stanley Flint" was not his real name, while Thompson, who had connections in the magazine world, claimed to have it on authority that he"d done time in prison. I wasn"t sure whether I believed any of this; nor, if truth be told, did the details of his youth interest me nearly as much as the mystery of how he spent all the days of the week that weren"t Wednesday, those days when he tarried in realms of sophistication to which, I felt certain, he was habituated, and which I longed to know. Unfortunately, about these points he was equally unforthcoming - not only, I suspect, because he wanted to protect his privacy, but because his enthusiasm for writing itself rendered all other aspects of the literary life, in his mind, superfluous. Thus he might casually mention having run into Susan Sontag "at a party," but only as a way of introducing some trenchant observation about Sontag"s work - an observation the most basic rudiments of which I would fail to take in, so awed was I by the very idea of a party at which Susan Sontag would be a guest. Or he might tell us that he"d been at dinner with a young writer named Liza Perlman, the daughter of the literary agent Sada Perlman, who seemed to represent all his favorites. Though only twenty, she had just published her first novel, Midnight Snacks. "Look at this," Flint would taunt, thrusting in our faces the book"s backside, from which Liza"s benign, oddly asymmetrical face, framed by red hair, stared out. "A junior in college, and already she has a book out. It makes you jealous, doesn"t it? But could you do better?" The fact was, I had no idea if I could do better. Indeed, so dazzled was I by Liza Perlman"s public image (and what was that photo on the back of the book but a literal public image?) that I barely registered her reality as a human being with whom I might someday compete. Though later she would become an intimate fixture of my life, Liza existed for me in those days less as a person than as a sort of fleshly emanation of that city in which she had gone to dinner with Stanley Flint, and in which I, too, hoped someday to live; indeed, had hoped to live ever since the summer my mother had taken my sister and me to spend two days at the St. Moritz Hotel, two days during which we did only the usual tourist things - shopped, and went to Broadway shows, and ate lunch at Rumpelmayer"s, where a waitress, when I asked for more water, snapped, "You"ve had your quota." And yet even this glimpse of New York had been enough to provoke in me a hunger for the city that lasted the next twenty years. "And another hundred people just got off of the train," Marta (in the guise of my sister) sang in a community theater production of Company to which I went that autumn. It was curious: watching her from the audience, I wanted to be one of those hundred people, for even then the city"s famed and pitiless indifference to new arrivals appealed to me at least as much as the array of beguilements, sexual and cultural, with which it enticed - movies and plays, lovers and restaurants, that whole landscape of anonymous distraction through which I saw myself wandering, not so much invisible as unrecognized, a hurtling atom in some charged and fluid field of possibility. That night I began nurturing a dream of the adulthood I would have in New York, a dream in which I lived on a high floor of a new skyscraper, in a perfectly round apartment the entirety of which was taken up by a circular mattress covered with pillows, and from the cushioned heights of which I might look out, each evening, at the brilliant light show that somehow I possessed even as it possessed me, along with Stanley Flint and Liza Perlman and all its other denizens. Denizens, not citizens: already I was thinking of New York as a place to which I was doomed. And as it turned out, I wasn"t far off the mark. "It"s ruined me for anyplace else," I used to tell people in those years when I really did live in a high-rise (albeit not in a round room), the years when I hardly stepped off the island of Manhattan, and felt sorry for anyone who had the misfortune to live anywhere else (especially - because the most vivid horror is always that nearest to home - in Brooklyn or Queens). I couldn"t imagine that a day would come when I"d view the city as being at least as narrow and provincial as that landscape of my adolescence which, like the protagonists of certain stories by Willa Cather, I"d thrown over, thinking myself too good for it. And yet how could I have recognized this, when I insisted so stubbornly on endowing New York with the power to authorize my very selfhood? One advantage of my university, for me, was its relative proximity to "the city," which was only an hour east by bus. Already I went fairly often, usually with my roommate, Jim Sterling, whose parents lived in a vast apartment on Central Park West. These weekends we devoted almost exclusively to the consumption of culture: museums and movies, and on Saturday nights, the theater, usually serious plays, the latest works by Marsha Norman or David Hare, instead of the "shows"- things like Cats and Evita - to which my mother had taken my sister and me, and which I now disdained. Jim"s ambition was to write for the culture section of the New York Times, and so in the mornings, over Sunday brunch, he would amuse his parents and me with disquisitions on whatever we had seen the night before - long monologues the thread of which I would gradually lose as I stared over the platter of bagels at Central Park, thinking about my own adolescence, how meager and colorless it seemed when compared to Jim"s, which had been crowded with activity: visits to the Temple of Dendur, and Radio City Music Hall, and the Museum of Natural History. Not that I had grown up in Willa Cather"s Nebraska; indeed, our pleasant Seattle neighborhood was by any standard other than my own a utopia. I exaggerated horribly - as if the future I longed for required as its prerequisite a lonely and impoverished past.Toward the end of that semester I entered my story about Aunt Bessie in a fiction contest that had been initiated a decade earlier by a famous television reporter in memory of his son, who had died in a mountain climbing accident. The story won - the first time the prize had ever been given to a sophomore. Not surprisingly, everyone else in Flint"s seminar had entered the contest too. My classmates greeted me, when I arrived for our last meeting, with a sort of low snarl of congratulations: good wishes beneath which I could detect the distinct and scary purr of feline rancor. The weather was unseasonably warm that May. Outside tulips, undeterred by the late snowstorms, bloomed with a fretful vigor. The air through the open window of the seminar room smelled sweet, while on the blackboard the subjunctive conjugation of the verb piacere - last remnant of that Italian class on which I had eavesdropped through the semester - testified to the human capacity, mysterious only when you think about it, to learn. Even Flint, dressed in a pink shirt and a jacket of greenish tweed, seemed to be in a sweet mood, at least to judge from the warmth with which he saluted us. Indeed, so kind was his welcome that for the first time I wondered whether the savage aspect he had shown that first January night might have derived not from some streak of sadism in his character, not even from an idea he had about teaching, but from simple shyness. I remember that in keeping with an old tradition at the school, everyone had brought food or drink to this last class: bags of potato chips and bottles of Coke and Sprite and plates of cookies, which we spread out over the seminar table like goods at a bake sale. Only Flint did not eat. Instead he talked. "Children, children," he intoned, his plaintive voice betraying a nostalgia to which I would not, at first, have thought him susceptible. "How quickly things end. It"s hard to imagine that only a few months have passed since our first evening together . . . yet this is the nature of things. You have been a blessing to me, every one of you. Of course you shall all receive A"s, and if there were a higher grade in the universe I would bestow it upon each of you. I wish I could give you more than A"s. But I can"t - only this little letter that may be of some use one day, along with a few parting words, a last assessment, some advice to take or ignore as you see fit." All sounds of consumption ceased. I think that what surprised us wasn"t so much this announcement itself as the fact that he was planning to give these final evaluations in class. Yet such, apparently, was his typically unorthodox plan, for now he began to make his way around the table, from student to student, granting each of us - even those who, having never gotten past sentence one, had given up trying - an appraisal at once judicious and generous, a liberal dollop of that balm he had previously dispensed only in tiny quantities, on the rare occasions when one of us wrote something that pleased him. As for me, I waited. Because - teacher"s pet that I was - I was seated immediately to his left, I knew I would be the last to be addressed. My turn came around ten. "Bauman," he began, turning his chair toward mine and stretching out his legs. "Bauman, Bauman, Bauman. What can we say about you? You have won the prize." Silence. Was this meant as congratulations? "You have pulled the brass ring, and now you get to ride the merry-go-round again. In fact, I don"t doubt but that you"ll be riding the merry-go-round the rest of your life." (Laughter.) "At first I wasn"t sure what to make of you. You seemed so eager, and so incompetent." (More laughter.) "But then you got ahold of something and didn"t let go. And I"ve got to applaud you for it. You"re fearless. You know what you want. That"s why of all the people in this room you"re the only one I feel certain will make a success of himself as a writer. And yet . . . of course there"s an "and yet," isn"t there?" (Still more laughter. Flint"s smile disappeared.) "I fear for you, Bauman. You are eminently corruptible. You can tell a story, but you haven"t become serious, and worse, you don"t seem to care about becoming serious. And once you"re out there, in the marketplace . . . I"m sorry to say it, but it"s easy for me to imagine you turning into a hack, settling for cheap success, and not because you"re greedy, but because you desire too desperately to please." All at once, to my shock, he took my hand. "If you prove me wrong, I"ll jump for joy. If you don"t, I ask you only to remember this voice. Remember that I"ve never said a word to you out of self-interest, or told you only what you wanted to hear." The room went silent. Quietly Flint removed his glove-leather hand from mine. "And now," he said, turning away from me, "I bid you all farewell. Stay in touch. As you know I don"t give out my home address. Nonetheless you can always reach me care of the English department here. The magnificent Mrs. Hall, the department secretary, has promised to forward everything along." Standing, he put on his coat. "Aren"t you staying for the party?" Mittman asked. "No, no," Flint answered sadly. "I -" And shaking his head, he left. We were alone suddenly, with all that food, and in my case, a consciousness that I was being stared at - not with envy, no longer with envy - but with pity. Pleading a final to study for, I fled. I went back to my room, where I started packing: in just a few days I would be leaving for New York, where I"d begin that summer internship at the publishing house for which I (and not Lopez) had been selected. And yet I couldn"t concentrate on my suitcases tonight. Instead, sitting at my desk, I pulled from the drawer the letter I"d just received from the news reporter, congratulating me on my prize. "Your story is both delightful and professional," he"d written, just as Flint had said that of all the students in the class, I was the one most likely to find success as a writer: words at the utterance of which a current of pride had surged through me, a sensation of heady potency that I now tried to revive, to re-feel in its original purity, before his subsequent admonishments had snuffed it out. Anyway, were Flint"s warnings fair? Leaning back, I tried to analyze my behavior over the course of the semester. All I had done, it seemed to me, was write a story he had liked, and win a prize; yet now he reproached me . . . and why? People forgive talent everything except success: Flint himself had told us that. Wasn"t it possible, then, that in castigating me, he was merely illustrating his own maxim, giving voice - he whose work had come to so little - to an envy not only of me, but of all of us, of all that earnest potential, so far unsullied by spite, that I and my classmates, in our eager youth, personified? That night, I committed the first of the many acts of betrayal that would punctuate the next twenty years of my life. Not that I denounced Flint, or called up Lopez to tell her she had been right all along: I did neither. And yet it is often the subtlest forms of defamation that prove, in the end, the most pernicious. For Lopez"s campaign against Flint, at least, had had the advantage of being up front and bold. My own, on the other hand, was underhanded, and consisted chiefly in telling the many people I met that summer in New York that though, of course, Flint was a genius - this went without saying - he was also a demagogue, petty and self-interested, and always trying to make his students dependent upon him, so that when or if they became successful, he could claim credit for their fame, and thus steal a portion of the recognition his own work had never earned him. (Partly true - which in no way absolves me of the charge of defamation. Anyway, the truth was not my goal. My goal was revenge.) The next afternoon I took the bus into New York, to have lunch with the young woman who had hired me for the summer internship at Hudson House Publishers. It was raining. As the bus entered the Holland Tunnel I thought casually of Flint, how tirelessly he"d trekked in and back from our school every Wednesday, no matter the weather. "For you, my children, I"d brave the fiercest storm," he"d said once, in that voice to the timbre of which I"d thrilled . . . No more. Already I was listening for other voices, ones which, because they belonged to a future that was for the moment fictive, a thing of my own imagining, I could make say whatever I wanted, like the stuffed animals that as a child I had imbued with personality. A joy to read, one said. And another said, the next J. D. Salinger. And the third said (I curse to remember it, I curse to repeat it), The truth and what you want to hear are the same.Copyright © 2000 by David LeavittAll rights reserved

FROM THE PUBLISHER

David Leavitt's deliciously sharp new novel is a multilayered dissection of literary and sexual mores in the get-ahead eighties, when outrageous success lay seductively within reach of any young writer ambitious enough to grab it.

At the dawn of the Reagan era, Martin Bauman -- nineteen, clever, talented, and insecure -- is enrolled at a prestigious college with a hard-won place under the tutelage of the legendary and enigmatic Stanley Flint, a man who can make or break careers with the flick of a weary hand. Martin is poised on the brink of the writing life, and his twin desires, equally urgent, are to get into print and find his way out of the closet.

As he makes his way through the wilderness of New York -- falling in love, going to parties, and coming to terms with the emerging chaos of AIDS -- Martin matures from brilliant student, to apprentice in a Manhattan publishing house, to one of the golden few to be anointed by the highly regarded magazine in which it is every young writer's dream to be published. Yet despite his apparent success, his emotional and creative desires stubbornly refuse to be satisfied, and his every achievement is haunted by that austere and troubling image of literary perfection, his elusive mentor, Stanley Flint.

An irresistibly entertaining epic, erotic, honest, and funny, Martin Bauman lays bare the life of the artist, in all his venal, envious, poignant glory.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

The literary life is given a sound drubbing in this comedy of egos and coming-of-age tale by Leavitt (The Page Turner; While England Sleeps) set in the 1980s of Reaganomics and the dawn of AIDS. Always "ready to pounce on a sure thing," as a classmate describes him, ambitious, gay Martin Bauman, part calculating and part ingenuous, decides in college that he will be a successful novelist and sets out with considerable luck and adroitness to achieve his goal in the New York literary world. Along the way, he meets up with a veritable catalogue of young urban literary types, most notably Liza, a self-centered young novelist who can't decide if she's gay or straight, and Liza's wealthy, dilettantish best friend, Eli, another writer and Martin's primary love interest. The vagaries of Martin's personal relationships, however, are fairly commonplace, much less entertaining than his turbulent professional ascent. Readers hip to the New York book biz will be tickled throughout by Leavitt's thinly veiled satiric references to various literary institutions. In his unnamed eastern urban college, Martin studies under Stanley Flint, a writer, editor and teacher whose eccentricities, power and drive make him a ringer for famed maverick editor Gordon Lish. While still an undergraduate, Martin is lucky enough to publish a story in an unnamed prestigious weekly magazine, probably the New Yorker. After graduation, Martin works for a venerable independent publisher whose adherence to intellectual standards in the face of financial troubles should be easy for readers to identify. Packed with gossipy detail and yet curiously detached in tone, the novel seems part sociological excavation, part intellectual soap opera. Though Martin inflicts at least as much damage as he suffers himself, he is an appealing antihero, inhabiting as he does a world where, as Leavitt eloquently and searingly demonstrates, there is no such thing as a "sure thing." 10-city author tour. (Sept.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

"...intelligent, funny, and genuinely revealing."

Library Journal

Leavitt's latest is a fictionalized memoir of a young writer's coming of age. While family plays a part, this is a more or less chronological recounting of the protagonist's coming east to attend a prestigious university, studying under the legendary editor Stanley Flint, moving to New York, and accepting his sexuality and early forays into dating and securing a lover. In part, the book reads like an old-fashioned roman clef, and fun can admittedly be had figuring out who is whom. In Martin, Leavitt creates a character whose literary talent and ambitions are not necessarily at odds with but certainly outstrip his ability to create a life that is either personally, sexually, or romantically fulfilling. Martin's social fumblings--presented with characteristic deftness and honesty--are often poignant and funny, and Leavitt's portrait of a time and place are masterly. Nevertheless, the overall effect is surprisingly cool and distant. For this reader--an admitted fan of Leavitt's fiction--the decision to present this material as a novel is squarely unsatisfying. Granted that the line between fiction and memoir is less clear now than ever before, one still wishes that Leavitt had thrown aside the pretense of fiction and presented us with a work as creatively conceived and emotionally intense as Martin Amis's Experience. Until then, one should stick to Leavitt's novels, where life enters art more obliquely. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/15/00.]--Brian Kenney, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Michiko Kakutani - New York Times

... both heartfelt and polished, it stands as a classic Bildungsroman about a young man's coming of age and provides as poignant and funny an account of literary apprenticeship as that found in the opening pages of William Styron's Sophie's Choice...the voice Leavitt uses in much of this volume ￯﾿ﾽ confiding, meditative and pliant ￯﾿ﾽ marks his rediscovery of one of his greatest strengths as a writer, and it points the way toward more satisfying achievements.

Laura Miller - New York Times Book Review