Customer Reviews

Martin Bauman: or, A Sure Thing

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

 

 

David Leavitt writes with a kind of honesty that is both bracing and luminous. His characters are so vividly and accurately drawn that their loves, desires, and aches are palpable. Behind and around these lives, he weaves a fabric of the near past, his New York (and surrounding) settings carefully depicted, and lends an uncanny familiarity to the places his characters inhabit. While the various plots hinge on, or at least draw from, aspiring writer Martin Bauman's interaction with the (not so) uber-professor and editor Stanley Flint, there is much else to experience here. The compassion with which the author delivers Martin's coming out (both to himself and to his friends and family), the confusion and fear of isolation that shadow him in these pages, ring painfully true and add an inexorable weight to his thoughts and actions. Leavitt's handling of the publishing world of the 1980s is deft: if reserved at first, it opens into whimsy and rage later. (Because I work in today's publishing arena, I found particular delight in several of these thinly-disguised scenes.) Martin Bauman; or, A Sure Thing is masterfully composed, and I savored every word. It was such a pleasure to read that I already, only hours from finishing it, long to be back in its depths again. While Leavitt's first novel, The Lost Language of Cranes, has always been a favorite of mine, this latest novel confirms his agility and maturity and is, I think, the most rewarding of all his published work.

It took me great perseverence to get through this book. At times I found it utterly uninteresting - this self-obsessed whining about relationships that are going the wrong way, the details about boring parties, all the repeats when describing the characters. I suppose it's a good thing Leavitt didn't make his own life and character look better- but maybe he should have. I don't really like Martin Baumann, nor his friends, nor anyone. Which should not be a problem if you feel that the person is experiencing mental growth. Here, none of that happens. Leavitt used to be good for his pointed, measured sentences. Now he's blabbing along for much too long. The earlier books may have been as he admits here - untrue and gloating - at least they were a better read.

I can't beliefe how rude and unfair most reviewers have been so far with this graceful novel, maybe not Mr. Leavitt's best (arguably 'The lost language of crains'), but still high above most brainwash & mediocre literature produced for the masses. And I have seldom seen such an interesting and vivid portrait of the 1980s, specially the growing media coverage of sudden success - and oblivion - as well as coming to terms with being gay in NY during the beginning of the AIDS crisis.

Martin BAUMAN is a great character and a very sharp novel, full of wisdom, insight and tenderness towards its main characters - as well as fierce, when displaying how the media create their own darlings or devils, which very seldom has to do with quality.

Please read this very persuasive and amusing novel and think how 20 years do make a difference about perceptions and society - and how little has really changed about accepting such a small and harmless difference like being gay. And enjoy its pages as much as I did devouring it!

This was a very interesting read. I bought this book when it was available through the U.K., plus I am a fan of Mr. Leavitt's work. (LOST LANGUAGE OF CRANES and WHILE ENGLAND SLEEPS are a must!!!) I must say this book kept me up late. It is an easy read, and it kept my interest going. This is a story of a writer trying to make it big in the literary world. But not only is he trying to get a bestseller, he is longing for a relationship. As the book progresses, he becomes a 'known' writer, and falls in love. Martin Bauman, the character, could be a likeable and un-likeable character. He is a man trying to reach the "American Dream" in writing. However, he is at times stubborn and selfish. My only problem with the book is I wish Mr. Leavitt would have a better "resolution." Mr. Leavitt should have put in an "epilogue" to the story, say what has been happening 10 years later. I felt there was an anti-climatic ending. Mr. Leavitt also likes to use BIG vocabulary words...such words I would expect in the SAT's. At times I thought I had to get the dictionary out. MARTIN BAUMAN is a "life imitates art" story that is well written and enjoyable.

I'm one of David Leavitt's biggest fans and have read all of his prior books. Doing so has lead me to have very high expectations of his work, and this book disappointed. While I found the underlying commentary on relationships intelligent, the delivery was rather torturous. Martin Bauman may be a minimalist writer; Leavitt, in this book, was the antithesis of minimalism. I found my patience tested by a seemingly interminable string of cocktail parties and other plot events whose value in character development was questionable at best.

If you are a fan of Leavitt's work you will probably still enjoy this book. If you have not read any of his previous work, I wouldn't start here. His short story collections and books like Lost Language of Cranes and While England Sleeps are far better showcases of his talent.

Several other reviewers have already commented on how repellent all the characters in this book are, and I wholeheartedly endorse their opinions. Besides being alarmingly juvenile and petulant, these characters, supposedly intellectuals, have only insipid conversations and seem to prefer pop culture like cartoons to the fine arts. Literature is just a career and a cozy milieu for these whining egomaniacs. True, Leavitt often invokes Proust, and when he does one yearns for Proust's narrator's humility and detached self-observation. One senses that Leavitt was trying to show growth at least in his eponymous character, but he fails, and Martin Bauman is the same unformed adolescent at the end of the novel. Leavitt writes at times with skill, but he relies too frequently on tortured metaphors to dress up a sentence. His attempts to place the story in an era also fail. Cultural references of the era are derivative, and sometimes inconsistent or mistaken, as when he describes an IBM Selectric typewriter as being high-tech in the 80s. I was also troubled by several instances where Leavitt gets the who/whom distinction wrong. Example: "...she was thinking of showing the manuscript to Stanley Flint, whom she was sure was going to love it." This is the grammatical equivalent of saying "She was sure him was going to love it." He also writes that Eli is working on a "string trio" that his mother hoped to persuade the Beaux Arts Trio to perform. As far as I know, the Beaux Arts Trio plays PIANO trios, not string trios. I also submit that the ending was arbitrary in its timing, as if even Leavitt had had enough of his dreadful book.

A very good book by Leavitt, who moves up a notch or two on my short list of favorite contemporary authors. His writing style, as always, is intelligent, fluid, often funny. The story is captivating, even moreso for being, basically, biographical. A literate, psychologically-adept description of the life of someone, not unlike myself, who struggles, often with painful awareness, with his ghosts and unfulfulled needs. An honest account of a time in the life of this wonderful author. While sometimes depressing, it is also often funny, touching and inspiring. I can handle an emotional moderately-wild ride if I have some sense of resolution by the end. This newest by Leavitt provides that in its somewhat difficult, though insightful, conclusion. I highly recommend it.

You have to descend deep into the hell of this book before it redeems itself, but when it does so, it does so brilliantly.

Anyone familiar with Leavitt's other work will recognize characters and plot elements from, well, just about everything he's ever written. As the plot moves forward, you start to recognize that while the elements are familiar, they've been shuffled. Genders have been changed, characters and actions that were peripheral in an earlier work are now central, the attributes of several old characters are stiched into someone new.

All of this is very annoying, and the book begins to feel like the last gasp of a washed-up hack, until it dawns on you what he's doing.

The beauty of David Leavitt's writing is its sense of comfort. His stories are the stories a smart friend tells you over a long dinner, and you don't know whether to be awed by his insight to his behavior or to pity his powerlessness over it. Leavitt's writing looks, smells and tastes like real life, and his gift is to make us forget that what we're reading is a story, not a confessional.

Sure, Leavitt's stories are based on his life (and other people's lives), but in jumbling together yet another narrative out of these old fragments and some familiar elements of his biography, he seems to argue that life, lived, is the source of art, but that it is not useful to read back into a specific life from a story. Because in a story, unlike in life, the author controls the action and the ending. After I turned the last page, where this point is made vividly, all my guessing about who's who in the novel made me feel complicit in and somewhat ashamed of my role in the very thing that Leavitt rails against in this work. Good book.

Regardless of whether there are actual autobiographical elements incorporated into this story, the point is that it reads as if there are, and that's just darned good writing. If a book sounds true, then that means it's written well! For me, this was Mr. Leavitt's most satisfying book since The Lost Language of the Cranes. Unlike that book, this one is supremely mature and introspective. Oh ...and it's funny and just a great read. I had a hard time putting it down. I don't know whether Mr. Leavitt and his friends are like the characters here (and I don't much care as I doubt I will ever meet any of them!); what's more surprising and entertaining is the biting critique of the world of book publishing. Trust me...it's so achingly dead-on that I am surprised any book publisher would actually publish it. If you still live in the bubble that thinks that most of the book publishing industry is still a craft performed with devotion and love, read and behold. Big corporations make it tougher and tougher for good writing like this to make it to bookstore shelves. Bravo to Mr Leavitt and may his writing continue to be as wise and well-crafted and wonderful to read.

Well, unlike most of the other review, I thoroughly enjoyed this read. Perhaps I'm biased, I'm a huge fan of Leavitt's prior work. I found Bauman to be a fantastically fun and easy read. Did much of it seem semi-autobiographical? Of course, but isn't that what writing is most of the time? It seems Leavitt is testing his character development skills with Bauman, really getting inside the head of the young protagonist and letting us inside the intimate thoughts and desires of this nineteen year old, and personally I found the ride fantastic.