Rating: 
Summary: The American Answer to Alan Holinghurst
Review: 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
Rating:
Summary: The American Answer to Alan Holinghurst
Review: 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
Rating: 
Summary: Gay Fiction in a Great Tradition
Review: 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.
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