Customer Reviews

Body of Jonah Boyd

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When David Leavitt published FAMILY DANCING in the l980's, I was convinced that he would be our next great gay writer as that book of stories was so brilliantly written. I have read everything that Mr. Leavitt has written since; from where I sit, nothing has measured up to his first book. THE BODY OF JONAH BOYD is no exception. I really wish I liked his fiction more. He seems to be a terribly nice person, certainly has a flair for language and often makes profound statements about the world in general. He, moreover, is most adept at character development, piling on detail after detail to make his people come alive. Here we even know what kind of purse one woman carries and what she has in it, for example. But in the end I find most of his characters not very interesting. In this latest novel, they all apparently are heterosexual. (Perhaps Mr. Leavitt is aiming for a larger audience here.) The narrator is a "fat" secretary (Denny)-- that's her description of her body, not mine-- who jumps into bed with married older men faster than she can type--certainly a little difficult to fathom. Then there's the writer who either does or doesn't get his works accepted by THE NEW YORKER, a recurring dilemma for many of Leavitt's characters.

What this novel does have going for it is that parts of it read almost like a decent mystery since Jonah Boyd's novel manuscript is missing.Yes, this book is a book is a book about books. But it has little to do with the brillance of Mr. Leavitt's early work.

Finally, whoever wrote the blurb on the inside front of the dust jacket said that this book is a tribute to "the sisterhood of secretaries." Surely he or she cannot be serious.

You know what I mean, "Never mind!" Think the book is overwritten and laugh out loud when Ben says that his writing was overwritten? Doesn't matter. Think the book gets simple facts about the period wrong? Doesn't matter. Why? Because at the end the author takes no responsibility for the book, in a last chapter written in the same voice but a different voice. Confused enough? Hopefully, not even to waste your time on this book.

"The Body of Jonah Boyd" centers around a single Thanksgiving dinner in the late 1960's in a college town outside Los Angeles. Jonah Boyd is a writer, the second husband of Nancy Wright's best friend Ann. Ann used to play four-hand piano with Nancy until Nancy moved to the west coast, where she started playing four-hand piano with our alleged protagonist, Denny, her husband's secretary and paramour. Ann and Jonah come to visit the Wrights at Thanksgiving, during which the notebooks containing Jonah's new novel are mysteriously lost sometime around the time Jonah and the Wrights' youngest son Ben, an aspiring poet, went for a walk down the arroyo. This event was a turning point in Jonah's life, in Ann's life and in Ben's life, but not particularly in Denny's life, yet again, the reason she thought so much about it is explained in the last chapter.

I'm sure there is some literary trick going on here that makes sense to the author and his editors, but the plot and characters in this book, as well as the overwritten prose style, "no cliche goes unused", don't make it worth your time. Find something better to read. It won't be hard.

Denny Denham is not only the secretary of Dr. Ernest Wright, a psychotherapist at Wellspring University, but also his lover and the best friend of his wife. Years after the 1968 Thanksgiving dinner she describes the events that took place: how the famous author Jonah Boyd and his second wife, a friend of Mrs. Wright, come for dinner and how he reads out loud part of the manuscript for his new novel. He takes the manuscript, written in leather-bound Italian notebooks, everywhere with him but the day after Thanksgiving they are suddenly lost. The whole house and surroundings are put upside down, but the notebooks remain lost: end of Jonah Boyd's career. Years later it becomes clear what happened to the notebooks and how they influenced the lifes of the people present at the dinner.

David Leavitt is a fantastic writer (The lost language of the cranes is wonderful), but this book appealed less to me. The family problems were very American and the storyline about the lost manuscript had a solution that one could see coming from a mile away. Despite all this it was a pleasant book to read during a rainy day camping.

I've read all of David Leavitt's fiction at least once, and I eagerly await each new book. As a former bookstore manager, I used to love selling his books with a personal recommendation. This was not a book that I could recommend.

To my tastes, instead of careful character development, Leavitt leaves the reader with plot twists and turns, spiced up with more than one change in narrative voice in the book's second half. While I am content for favorite authors to try new things - think of Michael Cunningham's The Hours - I found none of what delighted me about Leavitt's earlier fiction in this novel.

His sub-par performance is still at least as good as the run-of-the-mill novel, but I was hoping for his usual outstanding delivery.

David Leavitt hit me when I was reading his acclaimed The Lost Languages of the Crane. Since then, everybody has been looking for a similar book. Yet, there is none. What I have observed from Leavitt's fictional works is that the plot and drama is rather thin. His previous work, Martin Bauman, personally, is a change in style and plot - but that does not work. As for his latest work, Body of Jonah Boyd, the same old problem persists.

Before I read the last chapter of the book, I was confused with the ambivalence of the voice in the novel. The first half of the story was told by the protagonist, Denny. Later on, after several secrets were revealed, the chapters were dominated by the mysterious figure, Ben who happened to have stolen Jonah Boyd's notebooks and plagiarise the content as if it was his own. So, who is telling the story? Who is the centre of the book? The final chapter gave me the answer. The last chapter gives the story a touch of metafiction, and here, I am not able to tell so much or else the joy of reading this novel will be completely gone. Yet, I believe the way Leavitt ends the novel somehow heals a lot of defects found by the readers in the book.

However, there are still weaknesses in the plot. The marriage of Ben and Denny near the end of the novel is unhinted and it comes a bit too artificial for the sake of the plot. The use of 'brain tumour' to solve every dramatic crisis seems to me a little bit irreponsible of the writer. The potential lesbianism between Denny and Ben's mother is there, but is not developed, at all. In general, this novel plays a great deal of metafictive techniques and centres too much on the plot of how an unsuccessful writer steals the work of a successful one. All other subplots, the romance and other human relationships, are not handled dramatically and fully enough. If you aim at a fast read and do not have much expectations on the plot, Leavitt's new book will be your choice. At least, after reading the last chapter, you may whisper, "That all makes sense in the end."

It's nice to see David Leavitt back on the literary scene again. The Body of Jonah Boyd is probably one of his best works - literary, erudite with an eye for the ironic, the novel is both delectably charming, while also managing to say something about the importance of home and the nature of writing. The story is narrated by Judith (Denny) Denham, secretary to Professor Ernest Wright, a Freudian in the psychology department at Wellspring, a fictional university. The tale opens, on Thanksgiving 1969, where Denny is being a sort of third wheel or domestic assistant to the Wright family: She's Ernest's mistress as well as his secretary, the four-hand piano partner of his wife, Nancy, and a general dog's body around the house. She's taken for granted and generally bossed about.

Denny is an astonishingly perceptive character - she'd deeply flawed with a low self-esteem, but from the beginning there's a sharp contrast between the family's perception of Denny and her sharp view of what's really going on. The Wrights see her as "sexless spinster, or short of that, a lesbian" when, in fact, she has no trouble at all embarking on sexual escapades with men, including Ernest. Denny is always watching the family: she witnesses Ernest and Nancy's arguments, she offers support when their older son, Mark, flees to Canada to avoid the draft, and colludes with their daughter, Daphne, when she sneaks out of the house to meet her lover. Denny thinks the Wrights have invited her to into their family to make her the subject of some strange social experiment. Yet their motives for embracing her are far more individual: Nancy needs her to be a failure, Ernest needs her as an alternative to Nancy, and Daphne seems to need her as a confidante.

On the Thanksgiving of 1969, Nancy's old friend Anne comes for a visit, bringing along her new husband, the novelist Jonah Boyd. After dinner Anne proceeds to get drunk while, Boyd reads from the first chapter of his new novel, which he's writing in a series of beautiful notebooks. He has no other copy, and he's forever misplacing the notebooks. After Boyd dazzles everyone with his reading, the Wrights' younger son, Ben, shares a sample of his own work, a distinctly anticlimactic poem. Boyd takes Ben under his wing, even reading to him from the prized notebooks. But when it's time to leave, the manuscript is nowhere to be found. Boyd's masterwork is lost.

The second half of the novel is full of surprises and revelations that gradually reveal the secret of what actually happened to the notebooks. The story, full of ingenious plot twists, is interwoven with that of the Wrights' house, which itself emerges as an important character. According to Nancy the house "can be more than an assemblage of bricks and cement and shingles and it is not so different from believing in a guardian angel." The Body of Jonah Boyd remains a quite astonishing and compulsively readable tour de force. Leavitt has a slow-paced, richly descriptive, almost acerbic tone, which is perfection to read. And his subtly differentiated characters attach themselves to us and won't let go. This is a sweet, funny, almost melancholy novel, afloat in whimsy and affection, while also talking in mysterious ways about sex, frustration, the home, and the various shapes and sizes of unquenchable longing. Mike Leonard August 04.

Could not even get half-way through this book. Kept waiting for it to get better but it never did. Maybe it does after the halfway point, but I never made it that far.

I read this novel when it first came out, so I don't remember a lot of details. However, what I do remember is that I liked it enough to give it as a gift to four different individuals -- all of whom enjoyed it as much as I did.

I was actually checking out another book and this one was offered with it. Out of curiosity, I clicked on "Boyd" and was amazed to come across the recent negative reviews. This was one of the few novels I've read which, by the last page, every dangling question was answered -- sometimes in a very satisfying and surprising way.

I would recommended this book to anyone.

I first read Leavitt's books in the early years of 'Family Dancing' and 'Lost Language...'. They were wonderful, precocious, funny and moving books on a par with Michael Cunningham at his best. They rewarded the attention given to them and deserved all the praise they garnered. Then something began to slip, the writing seemed more pleased with itself, less focused and less incisive. Despite misgivings I've kept on reading him - occsaionally being delighted - but more often being disappointed as time went by and hoping for a return to form. And now Jonah Boyd.

Throughout, I read it quickly, begrudgingly, absent mindedly and with a sense of indifference. Love or hate or irritation are at least something. But indifference is a nagging feeling of wasted time, wasted money and wasted energy trying to commit to an idea that doesn't deserve it.

Slight doesn't even begin to capture it. Characterization is pallid, the plot and structure fade in and out of a kind of sub-Jamesian ironic distance. There's no engagement and you get the feeling that Leavitt grew bored as he wrote it and, having gotten to a certain point, just had to finish the damn thing and move on. The main narrator is just that - not a character but a voice or engine to keep the story going. The denouement, if that is what you can call it, is so obvious that it registers as nothing more than a blip and smirking joke to 'Jane Eyre'.

It's a tremendous shame. He has written and can write beautifully. But, if this is what happens to good writers when they go to college again to teach 'creative writing' then tear down the colleges, raize the departments, get them away from academe - something, anything, but get them to find a way to reconnect themselves with what made them so good to begin with. Or maybe persuade writers to take a long cool look at their work and ask themselves whether, at long last, the gig is up.

Why were the streets in this book given names each combining two states? Florizona, for instance. Was that supposed to be funny? It was simply annoying, as was this entire book. The characters, with perhaps the exception of Boyd, were bloodless, lifeless. I had no sense that they existed beyong the moments when they appeared in the story. I couldn't wait to finish the book, not because there was any mystery to it, but because I wanted to be finished with it. I never warmed up to Ben or anyone else.