Book Review	Book Reviews Archive

The Venice Adriana
Ethan Mordden
St. Martin's Press
How to order The Page Turner
David Leavitt
Houghton Mifflin
How to order Call Me
P.P. Harnett
St. Martin's Press
How to order

Ethan Mordden is among the most talented storytellers writing to day, as well as a knowledgeable opera commentator. So who better to write a novel based on the career of legendary diva Maria Callas? The Venice Adriana (St. Martin's Press, cloth, 294 pages, $23.95) centers on the trials of young editor Mark Trigger to coax out a long-overdue autobiography of the now-retired Adriana Grafanas (the title references Callas's famous Lisbon Traviata). As he becomes entangled in her life and complicated affairs-- her famous movie-star lover is being pursued by a scheming princess-- Mark discovers his own sexual longings, as well as a profound understanding of Adriana's music and love of life.

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Mordden cleverly interweaves Callas's real life with the plot of Francisco Cilea's opera Adriana Lecouvreur to build his theme: that love, life, and art are-- for artist and audience both-- inseparable. The technique works and Grafanas' (and, by implication, Callas's) already dramatic life takes on even larger meaning when recast as opera. The boldness and ingenuity of Mordden's conceit here is flawless. While the novel itself has some slow moments-- not unlike the recitative that moves opera plots along-- its near-perfect marriage of theme and form, story and voice illuminates and heightens the material.

As always Mordden writes compelling stories that are both straightforward and psychologically sound. As in I've a Feeling We're Not in Kansas Anymore and Some Men are Lookers, Mordden both replicates and artfully heightens the everyday, showing the meaning and sense in the humdrum of daily life. In Mordden's novels, "average" people sometimes become heroic, emblematic. Characters in operas are usually larger-than-life, but the love, hate, and jealousy they feel are familiar to all people. Mordden's writing here renders both regular humans larger-than-life, and the already-heroic opera stars more human.

Part soap opera, part real opera, and part opera-queen fantasy, The Venice Adriana works because Mordden understands that the lure of drama and the desire we all have to be grander, more tragic, and more completely human then we are in reality.

Another musical read

David Leavitt's last work, Arkansas, was the surprise of his career: funny, sexy, and thematically adventurous, it was a complete break from his more traditional narratives. Now in The Page Turner (Houghton Mifflin, cloth, 243 pages, $24), Leavitt returns to the style of story that made him famous.

Noted pianist Richard Kennington is a former child prodigy now entering middle-age. While in Rome, he meets and begins an affair with Paul Porterfield, a young man who is poised to follow in his professional footsteps. The affair is complicated by the fact that Pamela, Paul's mother, is also interested in Richard.

The affair is short-lived, but the story-- which reminds one of an updated version of a sophisticated 1940s Hollywood romances like The Seventh Vail or Intermezzo-- takes several startling turns when Richard, Paul, and Pamela discover that the power of love and eroticism is strong and more complicated then any of them imagined.

Leavitt's tone is different from the everyday depictions of reality that define his earlier work. The matter-of-fact tone of The Lost Language of Cranes or Equal Affections is replaced here by a slyly serious and ironically romantic style that-- as a style-- spends as much time commenting on the romantic involvements of its characters as it does describing them. The Page Turner feels a bit old-fashioned; often its domestic dramas seem to be born in the imagination well-made Broadway plays of the 1940s, or (as noted before) Hollywood's classic "women's films." But it is a compelling read, nonetheless, illuminating the complications of the human heart and desire.

Playing the personals

Gay fiction has long had the reputation of being simply about sex, a charge that is untrue, even when sex is the main topic of the story. P.P. Harnett's Call Me (St. Martin's Press, cloth, 182 pages, $11.95)-- which was released in England in 1996 to both critical acclaim and a hailstorm of outrage-- is certainly riddled with sex. Liam begins to answer personal ads to find out (he tells himself) about the type of person who places them. He quickly becomes obsessed with the ads, his respondents, and new sexual experiences. Alternately sexy and funny, charming and satiric, Call Me switches gears and tone quickly and with aplomb. Harnett has a terrific sense of how gay men think and talk to one another and the importance of thinking and talking about sex in gay lives.

But while Call Me is graphically sexual it's ultimately not about "what do you like to do" as it is about what it means to be a gay man looking for human contact in the maelstrom of the AIDS epidemic.

Harnett has a winning, breezy style and a perverse sense of humor, but the power of the book resides in his ability to convey the sheer desperation people have-- not about sex-- but about the need to make sense out of their lives, their feelings, and their desires.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com