Product Description

At the dawn of the Reagan era Martin Bauman, nineteen, clever, ambitious 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 writing careers with the flick of a weary hand. Martin is poised on the threshold of the writing life, his twin desires to get into print and to find his way out of the closet. Moving through the century's most licentious decade - the decade of cocaine, wild parties, huge advances and the tragic comedown of AIDS - Martin matures from brilliant student to apprentice in a Manhattan publishing house to fully fledged member of the New York literary brat pack. Yet despite his apparent success, his emotional and creative desires refuse, stubbornly, to be satisfied and his every achievement is haunted by the austere and troubling image of literary perfection, his elusive mentor, Stanley Flint. Subtle, erotic, honest and funny, David Leavitt's deliciously sharp, multi-layered dissection of literary and sexual mores lays bare the life of the artist, in all his venal, envious, self-loathing, poignant glory.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #962646 in Books
• Published on: 2001-12-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 466 pages

Review
'Wonderful' NEW STATESMAN 'A sharp satire on New York literary life ... Leavitt's portrait of the literary world is wickedly apt ... an engaging novel' INDEPENDENT 'A delicacy of wit and a nicely understated sense of irony' GUARDIAN 'A piquant observer of gay manners and sexual mores, Leavitt offers spry asides on literary pretensions and Brat Pack faddism' SUNDAY TIMES 'Funny and absorbing' THE TIMES 'Brisk, shrewd and eminently readable' NEW YORK TIMES

INDEPENDENT
'A sharp satire on New York literary life ... Leavitt's portrait of the literary world is wickedly apt ... an engaging novel'

GUARDIAN
'A delicacy of wit and a nicely understated sense of irony'

Customer Reviews

At last a return to more meaty form
After several rather dissapointing and shallow works from Mr Leavitt, one of the foremost current gay writers, along comes Martin Bauman.
Set in a not too distant past of New York we see Martin grow from a rather prissy college boy into a fully fledged member of the New York brat pack. Here Leavitt refrains from too much of the usual fumbling and frolicking descriptions to focus on the development of Martin into from a starry eyed young boy into a starry eyed but world weary man. While seeming over laborious in parts, it comes together brilliantly towards the end, the last line will need to be read severtal times before its full resonance becomes clear.

Literature, love and what being an artist is all about
David Leavitt's new novel explores what literature and art is all about. His narrator, the writer Martin Bauman, looks back at the beginning of his career and gives an insider's account of the publishing industry, an assessment of his fellow "brat pack" writers and recounts his first love story with fellow writer Eli Aaronson. All this is told in the mature voice of a writer who is now twenty years older and wiser. Ranging from 1980 to (roughly) 1986, Leavitt also gives a portrayal of the early Reagan era and the dawn of AIDS. Again, Leavitt fools his readers and critics by using a lot of seemingly autobiographical material, but the reader should be warned not to fall into the trap of reading this book as a confessional novel. It's a piece of art. In his last story collection, ARKANSAS, he stated that "writers often disguise their lifes as fiction, but only seldom disguise fiction as their lifes". He is doing just that (and has been doing it ever since the beginning of his career). A very fine novel. Although Leavitt published his first book in 1984, he still hasn't reached his peak, but instead is getting better and better with each book. Well done, Mr. Leavitt !

Just Petty
Wow. If ever a book captured the pettiness of humanity, this was it. The characters are petty, the storyline is petty, it's all just petty. Leavitt obviously has a strong command of the English language, and he appears capable of chiselling beautiful sentences from dreck, but the book left me dreadfully annoyed. I read and I read in the continuous hope that a likeable character would appear. None did. I read in the expectation of something consequential occurring. Expectation unmet. Supposedly, the book was a semi-autobiographical confession. If so I expect genuine contrition or something resembling apology. There were no genuine apologies or any exculpatory passages; the attempts were thin, lacking substance. Martin Bauman annoyed me greatly. I wouldn't bother. I give it two stars for the occasional beautiful sentence that grew out of the muck.