Allan Stein

"...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 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.

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.

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.