Customer Reviews

Allan Stein

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I really enjoyed this very funny, erotic and different novel. Matthew Stadler is probably one of the most gifted young novelists writing today. Even though his books are disturbing, they have a way of captivating you so that you can't wait to read the book right through. I lost some sleep over this one.

This is the story of a young teacher's journey to Paris to uncover the sad history of Gertrude Stein's troubled nephew Allan. The teacher travels to Paris under an assumed name, after being fired from his job because of a sex scandal. In Paris he becomes enchanted and obsessed with a 15 year old boy. Thus the story continues from there.... Forget the pedophiliac part of the story, this should not frighten you away from Matthew Stadler's excellent writing & descriptions of this time and place. His writing is so elegant at times its like reading a classic or it will be in time.

Whether he is shocking the reader, or enticing us with beautiful prose, Matthew Stadler, certainly know how to keep a reader's attention, and take you places you might not dare go alone. This is perhaps his best book yet.

Am I the only one who thinks this book is funny? The "eroticism" is utterly laughable. Isn't that the point? Isn't this Stadler's light-hearted version of "Lolita" from a gay perspective? The narrator is an immature overgrown teen himself. Obsessed with anatomy and sex in a way only an adolescent's mind can be. How can anyone take two page long descriptions of a fifteen-year-old soccer boy's body seriously? Its hyperbolic on purpose. And I'm a little tired of people complaining about this underage thing. The boy in the book is 15... not 8 or 7 or 5... and the narrator is hardly over 35. There are plenty of relationships, both gay and straight, where there are age differences of 15 or 20 years. I like this book. The style is arch, witty and satirically pretentious. I don't find the humor forced at all and I smiled a lot without a trace of wincing. Also, I returned from a trip to Paris last month and the French setting made the book all the more enjoyable and had me longing to return to check out all the places I missed

Matthew Stadler writes very well--sometimes heart-stoppingly well--and is bold both in experimenting with narratives and in again and again and again focusing on loving boys, an extremely fraught subject in contemporary America. I think that his first novel, Landscape:Memory, remains his most fully accomplished book (and, OK, it makes me more comfortable when the boylover is not an older man). Still, I like the ironical voice of the narrator in his desultory research on Gertrude Stein's nephew, his account of his friendship with a gay man of his own age in Seattle, and of his obsession with the son of the family with whom he's staying in Paris. The endings of all four of his novels seem forced to me, but I find the sensibility interesting and some of the sentences jewels. Anyone who believes that adolescent males lack any sexuality will be upset by the book. Others may still want to shake the narrator out of his complacencies and wonder if Mr. Stadler is in a rut -- even noting the different locales and eras represented in his oeuvre to date.

Stadler's book is a remarkable novel. His prose, of course, is incandescent and his sense of place as good as anyone writing today. The novel goes back and forth between the Steins' Paris at the turn of the century and late twentieth-century Paris. The novel--a story of obssession and erotic turmoil--begins and ends as a haunting testament to unfulfilled desire. My University class on gblt fiction read the book and found it funny, disturbing, terribly sad at times, and, as one student said, "Impossible to put down...I read it in one sitting." With each novel, Stadler's writing becomes more complex, elegant, and surprising. Allan Stein is his best book yet.

"...I'm threatened by the boy as a site of divinity and spiritual deliverance." -Matthew Stadler

This is not only "a haunting testament to unfulfilled desire" but to UNFULFILLABLE desire: very young yet nubile men possess an hermetic quality, an inaccessible psyche that makes them more desirable, less attainable. This reality, and the narrator's growing desperation--the boy's emotional immaturity acts as a kind of spiritual chastity belt, no matter how much sex they enjoy together--are very, very amusingly evoked in this sensual, very well-written picaresque.

15, by the way, is the age of consent in most European countries, 14 in Spain.

Stadler is in his ornate phase. The usual development of an artist in any medium is toward the baroque and ornate, a place the Beatles arrive at with St. Pepper's or Abbey Road in the late 1960s. It is, I confess, my favorite phase. Some may prefer the surreal comedy of Stadler's "Sex Offender," a novel simpler in theme: exotic sexuality vs. prosaic society's love-hate response to it. From my point of view, this is Stadler's masterpiece.

Stadler's sentences are lush and meandering. His descriptions, perhaps overlong, reward with poetic grandeur and learned reference. He is a prose-poet of the senses, akin to Arthur Rimbaud or Garcia Lorca, the latter of whom his lead character uses to seduce a Seattle high school boy he tutors.

His lead character is on paid leave from the school under a cloud of suspicion. He uses the hiatus to investigate an artistic mystery, the life of Allan Stein, famous Gertrude's nephew and the possible model for a famous painting. Matthew moves from rainy Seattle to sumptuous Paris, where the sensual descriptions continue to impress. In a piece of droll postmodern self-referencing, Stadler describes his own style and aims while ostensibly talking about Lorca's: "Lorca's poem might appear to be unreal, but its dreamlike consistency can supplant waking reality by the force of a new coherence & logic."

Edmund White, who soaked himself in all things Parisienne while writing the biography of Jean Genet, admires this book. It is, like White's writing, extremely sophisticated and sensual. Like Stadler's previous novel "Sex Offender," "Allan Stein" shows the ways in which, to use a Nietzschean paraphrase, "Sexuality penetrates the loftiest reaches of the intellect." "Allan Stein's" 15yo boys are described in the same way: as lean and smooth, as having near-visible hearts beating close to their ribcages, as being more interested in sex than Matthew's intellectual observations.

Stadler's response to his disgraced teacher's ephebophilia and the turbulence it may well provoke in him and in society is a relentless romanticizing. If this kind of love is unnatural, Stadler embraces the unnatural, as found in florid writing, art museums, and exotic Francophilia. As such, he does not attack this taboo directly. What is a loss for advocacy is a gain for literature.

I enjoyed this novel on a fairly perfunctory level as I've recently read far more involving gay fiction. While reading Allan Stein, I was reminded of British author Alan Hollinghurst, who I feel does a far better job in portaying the sexual mores and misdemeanors of the "upper crust" college educated and artistically driven gay man. Allan Stein does not disappoint though as there are some good things about this novel. The descriptions of Paris and rural France, especially the French Mediterranean are startling in their authenticity; Stadler manages to capture the wonderful idiosyncrasies of Parisian gay life. He also demonstrates a remarkable command of the language and his capacity for constructing wonderfully complex and fluent sentences astounded me. The story of the narrator's pedophiliac obsessions with Stephane, the 15 year old Parisian are similiarly funny, sexy, erotic and dangerous but yet strangely unconvincing. As for the central theme of man boy love, wel, I feel Stadler is making an important point that some teenagers can be very aware of what they are doing in matters sexual. In approaching this theme, however, Stadler seems intent on perpetuating the stereotypes of man boy pedophile relationships. Paul Russell handled this issue far more effectively in The Coming Storm, a very upbeat and realistic account of the same scenario. There are some wonderfully funny and heart rendering scenes in Allan Stein, especially the scenes between the narrator and Stephane's family. The long distance phone conversations made to his partner in crime Herbert back in the US also provide some laughs. In general, however, I think a deeper appreciation of this novel really depends on having a familiarity, not just with the French language but Paris and all things Parisian. The novel at times appears as a rather intellectually astute tourist guide to Paris. This novel IS challenging and it IS full of complexities, however don't let this put you off. I've just ordered another of Stadler's novel's as I admire his sophisticated, intelligent (if not a little pretentious) style. I just hope he has the fortitude other equally important gay related themes.

Startlingly intelligent, 'Allan Stein' is a literary novel rich in descriptive detail, imagery and flowing prose which merges the past and the present in a simultaneously witty and poignant search for identity.

Our narrator is a school teacher 'on leave' following a (false) accusation concerning a teenage pupil by the latter's parents. Ironically, the accusation gives rise to a genuine relationship with the boy. As this subsequent relationship wanes, the narrator becomes caught up in the fantasy of the long-deceased subject of a Picasso portrait. He sets off to Paris, under the guise of being a museum curator, searching for some Picasso sketches of the boy in question. Initially comfortable with this liberating change of identity, the narrator becomes infatuated with the teenage son of the family with whom he is lodging in Paris. The novel then charts the course of his relationship with the boy, the boy's family, and the myriad of other enigmatic characters that he encounters.

Indeed, Matthew Stadler's gift for characterisation is partly what draws the reader so deeply into the narrator's world. The intimate portrayal of the 15 year old boy, Stéphane, is particularly honest and vivid. There are no delusions here - the boy may be stunningly beautiful (the moment of meeting him "made a tear in the fabric" of the narrator's day) but equally (referring to Stéphane's 'digestive problems') it proves "alarming that such an exquisite surface could contain all that flatulence"). The author's descriptions of the boy's mother, Miriam, and the narrator's own mother, are equally realistic and clear - which serves as a stark contrast with the narrator's own, more fluid, personality and sense of self. It is a testament to the author's skill that this self-insight grows in such an organic way that, by the end of the novel, the realisations that our narrator achieves are natural and just. It is thus not so much a journey of self-discovery, as a gradual transfer of self-knowledge from the subconscious to the conscious.

If you are seeking a light-hearted plane-journey read, you might be advised to look elsewhere. Matthew Stadler's novel deserves active, thoughtful participation. You will be well-rewarded, however, as his expertly-drawn characters, enchanting dialogue and erotic, humorous prose, combine to make 'Allan Stein' an exceptionally insightful work that will undoubtedly withstand any test of time.

Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Men's Gay Fiction published in 1999, "Allan Stein" is brilliantly crafted. Matthew Stadler's literary homology is to Henry James, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, and Vladamir Nabokov in this story of obsession with the beauty of teenage boys.

The backdrop is Picasso's and Gertrude Stein's Paris, and Stadler lists scholarly sources for his historic and geographic descriptions as he weaves his story with time shifts between the 20s and today.

Guy Davenport praises Stadler's Jamesian style and rates his sensuous eroticism above Nabokov's. Stadler pays oblique homage to Davenport's "The Cardiff Team" when he echoes a description of boys smelling "like oranges." And Stadler's ability to evoke the senses of smell, taste, and touch are extraordinary. He is as deft with them as less skilled writers are with sight and sound. The purple quill has never been more purple. Although not pornographic, the occasional sexual episodes are explicit and achingly erotic.

The story involves a teacher, fired for a rumored affair he didn't have, who poses as his friend, an art museum curator, on a mission to Paris to recover lost Picasso drawings of Gertrude Stein's nephew, Allan. While there, Matthew (alias "Herbert"-recalling Nabokov's Humbert Humbert of Lolita) meets Stephane, the fifteen year-old son of his host family. From first meeting, Matthew's interests, fantasies, and seduction of the boy are on the fast track. While he dabbles at literary, biographical, and art research, Matthew's ability to focus is cold-cocked by Stephane, who flits from Metallica to swimming to soccer to sex.

As with his earlier novel, "The Sex Offender," Stadler creates a character whose narrative is entirely subjective, marginally dellusional, and socially deviant. "Allan Stein" is a reverie for the beauty of male adolescence, young Stephane being the embodiment of all whom Matthew has worshipped. Read this book for its dark, bittersweet comedy, its elegance of phrase, its cretive integrity, and its insight into what may be the ultimate sexual taboo. It is a worthy Lambda Literary Award winner.

While reading the book, I was struck by all the similarities to Hollinghurst's amazing "The Folding Star". Both books feature a teacher who lusts after teenage boys, a trip by this teacher to a non-English speaking "old world" country and an unusual blend of historical fiction, unabashed erotica, and Proustian pyrotechnics.

The writing is quite wonderful in this book, but is not as dense or as high-brow as Hollinghurst's. Instead of impressing us with his vocabulry, Stadler brings a unique gay American sensibility to the novel, which gives it quite a different sensibility than Hollinghurst's.

While both writers will obviously be compared to Proust and to Mann, I find both Holinghurst and Stadler to be reminiscent of A.S. Byatt. Just like in some of Byatt's writing, the search for historical truth also parallels the search for truth in one's own life. I definitely recommend this book, although If I were to only read one of them, I would read the better book, The Folding Star