From Publishers Weekly
This engaging though slight family romance centers on manipulative psychoanalyst Ernest Wright; his hysterical wife, Nancy; and their teenage children, Daphne and neurotic budding writer Ben. Their household is a magnet for complicated and clandestine entanglements, with narrator Denny, secretary and lover to Ernest and surrogate daughter to Nancy, fetishizing the Wright house as a substitute for the home she never had; and Glenn, Ernest's graduate student and doppelgänger, secretly loving up Daphne. Enter, one Thanksgiving in 1969, Nancy's best friend Anne and her novelist husband, the charming wife-beater Jonah Boyd, who become blowsily seductive surrogate mother and warmly paternal literary mentor to Ben. When the notebooks containing Jonah's nearly finished masterpiece go missing, they take on a mythic status that reverberates through Ben's subsequent career. The tale draws a link between literary creation and family procreation: just as a book started by one writer can be finished by another, the process of psychosexual development started by parents is completed by their Oedipal and Electra stand-ins. Leavitt (The Lost Language of Cranes; Equal Affections; etc.) possesses a limpid style, a gift for characterization and a sharp eye for middle-class family life. But his contrived plot, driven by the characters' obsessions with a talismanic manuscript and a talismanic house (the Wrights cannot bequeath their beloved home to their children because the university where Ernest teaches owns the land), fails to convincingly join together his two themes, the one an exercise in classic Freudianism, the other the sort of writerly pondering of the sources of inspiration that primarily interests other writers. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Some novelists are able to make a career by strip-mining their own lives, writing thinly veiled autobiography, while others work best by imagining themselves as far from their own experience as possible. David Leavitt has usually been the former sort of writer; his previous novel, the awkwardly titled Martin Bauman; or, A Sure Thing, was a large, rambling, comic bildungsroman about a young gay writer (a lot like David Leavitt) who studies with a flamboyant creative writing teacher (a lot like Leavitt's teacher Gordon Lish) and who faces the equivocal consequences of early success (a lot like Leavitt has). At least once before, however, Leavitt imagined himself into somebody else's autobiography, in his novel While England Sleeps, which was about an English anti-fascist poet in the '30s who was a lot like Stephen Spender. This novel got Leavitt into trouble -- Spender sued him, and Leavitt was forced to make changes -- which was unfortunate, because it's Leavitt's liveliest and least self-conscious book.Leavitt's latest novel, the clever and extremely entertaining The Body of Jonah Boyd, isn't quite as distant from his experience as the Spanish Civil War, but it still relies more on imagination than on autobiography. It's also his first novel to be narrated in the first person by a woman and a heterosexual (more or less), to wit, a sharp-tongued and quietly observant university secretary named Judith "Denny" Denham. Her boss is a prominent psychology professor, Dr. Ernest Wright, and in the complicated way of ingrown academic communities, Denny has become a de facto member of the Wright household -- part maiden aunt, part unpaid housekeeper. That may make her sound like a victim, but the truth is she's anything but. Denny is a past mistress of passive-aggressive manipulation, skillfully playing both ends against the middle: sleeping with Dr. Wright on the weekends and, during the week, playing four-hand piano with Dr. Wright's lonely and high-strung wife, Nancy. This puts her in a better position than most secretaries to know the secrets of her boss's family, and she shrewdly observes the melodrama around her, as the Wrights' eldest son flees to Canada to avoid the draft, their daughter carries on a secret affair with one of Dr. Wright's grad students and, most important, the Wrights' sullen, narcissistic youngest son decides he wants to be a writer.The autobiographical elements are lightly worn here. The novel's set in a fictional California university town a lot like Palo Alto, where Leavitt grew up in an academic family. And one suspects that Ben, the obnoxious fledgling writer, is something of a mocking self-portrait (though, in another first for Leavitt, he's not gay). Just how mocking becomes clear when Nancy's best friend from back east, Anne, comes to visit, accompanied by her new husband, a well-known novelist named Jonah Boyd. The result is the best sequence in the novel, a bravura, 50-page comic set piece of Thanksgiving at the Wright household that climaxes in a sort of competition between the bratty wannabe Ben and the pompous and condescending Jonah Boyd. This in turn results in a literary disaster, the true nature of which isn't revealed for another 30 years. I don't want to give it away, but let's just say Leavitt is still -- comically, entertainingly -- working through his Stephen Spender issues.Indeed, the big surprise of the book is easily guessed long before Leavitt pulls aside the curtain, but even so, the impact of the revelation relies more on its moral complexity than it does on shock value. A bigger problem for the book is that, while the prose is never less than glittering, the stunning Thanksgiving set piece is sandwiched between two rather large chunks of pure exposition. In the first, Denny simply lays out the geography of the town and of the family, while after the Thanksgiving sequence, she in effect summarizes most of the rest of the story. Relatively little is dramatized, which has often been a problem with Leavitt's work; pages and pages of Martin Bauman, for example, are pure exposition. This, of course, may be more a matter of taste than anything else; "show, don't tell" has become a writing workshop cliché, and there's a solid tradition in Europe (think Milan Kundera or W. G. Sebald) of entire novels that are told, not shown. Still, Leavitt is such a stunning dramatist of the private anxieties and mixed motives of a social gathering that it's a shame he didn't dramatize more.In the end, though, the novel satisfies, for three reasons. One is the way the book turns the question of literary originality into a tragic moral conundrum. Another is the clever construction of the plot, which resolves with the precision-engineered snap of a Victorian novel. And the third and most important reason is the pure pleasure of reading the brisk, unblinkered and often hilarious judgments of an academic secretary on her betters. It's a sharp, backstage view of a certain type of middle-class life, like a Jane Austen novel told from the point of view of one of the servants, and I suspect that Ms. Austen herself would have enjoyed the result. Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.


From Booklist
Thirty years later, Judith "Denny" Denham recalls the fateful Thanksgiving of 1969, which she spent with the family of her employer, Dr. Ernest Wright of Wellspring University's psych department. Momentous at the time because Nancy Wright's best friend from back East was visiting with her new husband, novelist Jonah Boyd, the day became more momentous because during it Boyd lost his magnum-opus third novel. A few years later, he fell off the wagon and drove into a bridge. The slow revelation of what actually happened that day to the manuscript and among several characters, especially Anne Boyd and 15-year-old Ben Wright, may be the mainspring of the action here, but the dozens of smaller, character-related disclosures Denny makes as she retraces everybody's steps before and after as well as on that day account for the pungent, sad charm of Leavitt's satisfying new novel. Followers of Leavitt's career may note that his nemesis, plagiarism, figures in here, while homosexuality, formerly prevalent in his fiction, does not, and conclude that this is his best novel. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
"[Leavitt] explores the nature of authorship and authenticity like a genteel Phiilip Roth."


Book Description
Denny is a secretary who has just begun an affair with her boss, while also maintaining a friendship with his wife. Invited to the family's house for Thanksgiving dinner, she enters into a chain of events that will change everyone's lives in ways that none can imagine. Hilarious, scorching, and full of surprises, The Body of Jonah Boyd is a tribute to the power of home, the lure of success, and, above all, the sisterhood of secretaries.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"It's 1969, and Judith 'Denny' Denham has just begun an affair with Dr. Ernest Wright, a psychology professor at Wellspring University, who just happens to be her boss. But her position in the Wright household is not merely as a mistress. Ernest's wife, Nancy, has taken Denny under her wing as a four-hand piano partner and general confidante, although Denny can never seem to measure up to Anne, Nancy's best friend from back east, either in piano-playing skill or general grace. Ernest's eldest son has fled over the Canadian border to escape the draft, while his only daughter has embarked on a secret affair with her father's protege. The remaining son, Ben, is fifteen, and as delicate and insufferable as only a poetry-writing fifteen-year-old can be. That autumn, Denny crosses the freeway that separates Wellspring from its less affluent mirror image, Springwell, to spend Thanksgiving with the Wrights and their assortment of strays, including two honoured guests: the eagerly anticipated Anne and Anne's new husband, the novelist Jonah Boyd." The chain of events set in motion that Thanksgiving will change the lives of everyone involved in ways that none can imagine, and that won't become clear for decades to come.

FROM THE CRITICS

James Hynes - The Washington Post

It's a sharp, backstage view of a certain type of middle-class life, like a Jane Austen novel told from the point of view of one of the servants, and I suspect that Ms. Austen herself would have enjoyed the result.

Lynne Perri - USA Today

The Body of Jonah Boyd engages us in Denny's world, where her wit, her shortcomings and her longings take her to a final decision that is stunning, and yet, somehow, inevitable.

Claire Dederer - The New York Times

The book, with its acerbic tone and tight plot, is an unlikely vehicle for a paean to domesticity, yet it's this odd fit that makes The Body of Jonah Boyd such a pleasure. And Leavitt is once again having a surprisingly good time messing about with the idea of authorship.

Publishers Weekly

This engaging though slight family romance centers on manipulative psychoanalyst Ernest Wright; his hysterical wife, Nancy; and their teenage children, Daphne and neurotic budding writer Ben. Their household is a magnet for complicated and clandestine entanglements, with narrator Denny, secretary and lover to Ernest and surrogate daughter to Nancy, fetishizing the Wright house as a substitute for the home she never had; and Glenn, Ernest's graduate student and doppelganger, secretly loving up Daphne. Enter, one Thanksgiving in 1969, Nancy's best friend Anne and her novelist husband, the charming wife-beater Jonah Boyd, who become blowsily seductive surrogate mother and warmly paternal literary mentor to Ben. When the notebooks containing Jonah's nearly finished masterpiece go missing, they take on a mythic status that reverberates through Ben's subsequent career. The tale draws a link between literary creation and family procreation: just as a book started by one writer can be finished by another, the process of psychosexual development started by parents is completed by their Oedipal and Electra stand-ins. Leavitt (The Lost Language of Cranes; Equal Affections; etc.) possesses a limpid style, a gift for characterization and a sharp eye for middle-class family life. But his contrived plot, driven by the characters' obsessions with a talismanic manuscript and a talismanic house (the Wrights cannot bequeath their beloved home to their children because the university where Ernest teaches owns the land), fails to convincingly join together his two themes, the one an exercise in classic Freudianism, the other the sort of writerly pondering of the sources of inspiration that primarily interests other writers. 9-city author tour. (May) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

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