David Leavitt can't write. His sentences are ugly, his paragraphs even more so, and the hundred or so pages of this book that I read seemed to indicate that his structure is pretty awful too. The characters are unmotivated and unpleasant. The greatest problem, though, is that clearly none of it ever happened. The adjectives and adverbs are just put in for decoration, not to share with you what the protagonist really experienced. In one scene a delivery boy rings the bell and for some reason stands there "sheepishly" while he receives his money. It's like he has an alarm that rings every hundred words and he has to pop a descriptive word in; they're like speed bumps that prevent you from getting up any momentum in the novel. ( )

This is my 8th Leavitt book. And i really seemed to enjoy most of his work....but this was a slog for me. It's a little hard to pin down specific big things, but there are whole bunch of little things. I guess in a nutshell, the main characters were just people i did not like.....i tried to be a Martin fan......but he kept doing bone-head things and saying ridiculous things.......i had to let go. There was an over abundance of peripheral characters that would reappear for a second here and there.....so many that i often had no idea who 'so & so' was that they bumped into at the beach....or in Italy.......it was just too much. And about the writing.......so much of this revolves around them all being up and coming writers.....and Martin's somewhat obsession with his teacher Mr.Flint......who was brutally honest in his assessment of student's writing...a favorite line of his being....'get on with it!!!' In my opinion, Leavitt would have been wise to listen to his character, Stanley Flint. Too long, too much extraneous material, too many unimportant characters for me to keep track of, and the minutae of Martin's unhealthy relationships with everybody was very tedious. I enjoyed seeing the 'inside' story of a publishing house (albeit fictional), and Martin always had great insight as to why he did all the stupid dumb things he did in retrospect.....but there were just too many of them! Leavitt just did not click with me on this one......it happens...... ( )

It takes a certain boldness to write a first person narrative using a persona as unsympathetic as Martin Bauman, reasonably successful writer, reasonably unsuccessful gay man. Leavitt writes about the New York literary scene and by extension about the gay scene in New York at the time of the first spreading of the AIDS virus. THrough Bauman we readers see the process of writing, and are exposed to the narcissism and pettiness of the literary party scene of the 1980s. It is clear that Bauman is committed to writing well, at the same time as wishing to rise socially; he traffics in literature and snobbery, both insecure and vulnerable, but also arrogant and vain. The living arrangements of the impoverished writer and the successful artist, the middle class home and the literary museum are delineated beautifully. In reading the book I felt a number of literary ghosts at my shoulder and really struggled to work out whose slightly orotund prose I was channelling. On finishing I thought it might be Antony Powell, another slightly declasse chronicler of an exclusive literary world bordering on the louche and the aristocratic...

I enjoy David Leavitt's writing: clear, sometimes terse, but occasionally lyrical. This book seemed a venture into a rather different style, still clear but more opulent. Is this a coming of age story of Leavitt cast as Martin Bauman the author looking back at himself? The name as well as the story has depths of meaning which the reader can tease out making it a satisfying story. ( )

A very good read...Leavitt is absolutely consistent in his ability to engage the reader and keep them stimulated...not a complicated story by any means of the imagination...I have many friends like Martin Bauman..but Leavitt has a way of capturing what is not so obvious and write about the complicated psyche of people and certainly of Gay men...their pluses and their minuses....I trust that we can learn from his writing. ( )