Rating: 
Summary: Youth fixation
Review: A beautifully written and utterly disturbing story of one man's obsession with young boys. A young teacher who's been involved with one young lad in America, flees to France to research Gertrude Stein's nephew Allan. While there, the teacher becomes enchanted with the 15-year old Stephane, with whom he travels to Southern France. This is quite in the tradition of works like Mann's "Death in Venice", and quite lovely. It just bothers me, this fixation on young boys which is borderline pedophilia.
Rating:
Summary: The insignifance of manhood
Review: By the end of Allan Stein, you get the feeling that if Stadler was not so apt at words, he'd have made an excellent weatherman. While being ignorant of the true reality of nearly everyone and everything around him- a consequence of his extremely narrow and pitiful obsession with Stephane, the boy of the Parisian house where he stays- the narrator comments incessantly on the weather. That little literary quirk aside, Allan Stein is highly-readable and entertaining despite the flimsiness of its premise, the thinness of plot, and the lack of development of any character except the deceptive narrator. Half-way through the novel, the narrator's quest to research Allan Stein- which in itself is a ploy to escape troubles at home and pass himself off as his curator friend- becomes even less believable than at the start. However, the often brilliant writing in this novel carries the reader to the end, and it's at the end that Allan Stein really rises above an adequate gay novel and becomes a more profound rendering of the disappointment of adulthood. Stadler paints a distinct parallel between Allan Stein and the narrator; both interesting and promising boys; both uninteresting and disappointing as men. The Gertrude Stein quote that opens the novel is perfectly chosen. The best parts of the novel are actually little episodes- Stadler's account of Allan Stein's boyhood and the narrators hilarious conversations with the friend he is impersonating. I think seeing this as a story about pedophilia is stretching the comfort zone of morality- after all Stephane would be above the age of consent in many European countries- and to see it as a love story is really stretching the definition of love! It's a novel about boys growing up to be men, and those who don't do such a good job at it.
Rating: 
Summary: Allen and his horse
Review: I agree that this a just another version of "Lolita". But in contrast to "Lolita", the descriptions are much more subtule and less confusing. The author has a sense of reality which he desrcibes and smooths over with romaticism.
I am sorry to say that I did not find this book to be so absolutely shocking as others did. It is really not that bad, and honestly, now-days this stuff probably is more common than a few years back. If girls are willing to have an affair with an older man, why is it so difficult to imagine that boys might too?
But what touched me deeply was the author's shyness with the matter. Don't get me wrong, he describes things almost fully, but he does it in a manner that seems chaste to me. He says things like, "If the reader cannot stomach more of this, turn to page 47 for resumed dialouge" and "much to some readers pleasure, and to some reader's horror" (when he says that he slept with the Turkish boy).
Of course, pedophilia is not very right, but it does happen. He deals with it beautifully, and his character pretty much beds only boys that are willing. He doesn't force them, so that also makes it forgivable.
Rating:
Summary: "Boy Leading a Horse"
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Bold book about a topic that horrifies many
Review: Matthew Stadler writes very well--sometimes heart-stoppingly well--and is bold both in experimenting with narratives and in again and again and again focusing on loving boys, an extremely fraught subject in contemporary America. I think that his first novel, Landscape:Memory, remains his most fully accomplished book (and, OK, it makes me more comfortable when the boylover is not an older man). Still, I like the ironical voice of the narrator in his desultory research on Gertrude Stein's nephew, his account of his friendship with a gay man of his own age in Seattle, and of his obsession with the son of the family with whom he's staying in Paris. The endings of all four of his novels seem forced to me, but I find the sensibility interesting and some of the sentences jewels. Anyone who believes that adolescent males lack any sexuality will be upset by the book. Others may still want to shake the narrator out of his complacencies and wonder if Mr. Stadler is in a rut -- even noting the different locales and eras represented in his oeuvre to date.
Rating: 
Summary: Stadler's high aspirations fall flat.
Review: Notwithstanding the linguistic pyrotechnics that Matthew Stadler employs to lift this book towards a higher literary plane, "Allan Stein" is nothing more than a lame account of teenage fixation bordering on paedophilia. Besides the narrator and the subject of his obsession, the hotch-potch group of supporting characters - the real Herbert Widener, the boys' parents, the French curator, the Danish tenant, the strange but wealthy Englishman - are entirely incidental. Even the young boy who stole his heart is a puzzlement. His cold facade is unfathomable right up to the final pages. The historical accounts of Allan Stein, while providing a backdrop for the narrator's trip to Paris, is itself a sad excuse for the novel and adds little of consequence to the heart of the story. The entire tale would be better off as a short story but I was kept turning and turning the pages (hence, the book succeeded to that extent) to get to the point of it all which, alas, is still a mystery to me. The finale, if you call it that, was hurried and unsatisfying; a climax that never came. For a much more intelligent and less deceiving account of the same theme, read Alan Hollinghurst's "The Folding Star".
Rating:
Summary: The Abbey Road of Transgressive Literature
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: The Abbey Road of Transgressive Literature
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Somehow...this book 'misses'
Review: The author is an EXCELLENT writer. There is no question about that! I think what is missing here is the flow. It's not a book where you finish each chapter and you have to 'keep reading'. You can set it on a table...and quite possibly wait a year to pick it up again. The story is relatively simple--with a few eyebrow raisers here & there. The writers' writing is the only thing that captures the reader (me). I'd highly recommend this author read the book, THE HOURS by Michael Cunningham or MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA or THE NOTORIOUS DR. AUGUST...then, you'll read a story that 'flows'.
Rating: 
Summary: Intriguing, but ultimately disappointing
Review: This novel mixes art history with the fictional present. Matthew, a young teacher in a private school, is accused of molesting one of his students. The turth of this is is that he has not molested him - yet. Ironically his suspension from the school gives him and the student the opportunity to consummate these accusations, from which Matthew is even more ironically cleared. During his suspension, Matthew and his friend Herbert, an art museum curator, discuss a painting by Picasso called Boy Leading a Horse. Herbert discusses the painting and the past that the boy was the nephew of Gertrude Stein. He suggests there must be sketches this boy that somehow could be obtained by going to Paris and meeting the family. Matthew now interested in Allan Stein, long dead by this time, gets Herbert's permission to assume his identity, fly to Paris and hunt for evidence and sketches of Allan. Matthew stays with the Dupaigne family and becomes attracted to fifteeen-year-old Stephane. At this point author Stadler interposes Allan Stein's life as a teen-ager as a counterpoint to Matthew's attraction to Stephane. It is as though Matthew obsessed with Allan is trying to seduce a boy who was Stephane's age in the early 1900's with Stephen himself. This is an interesting concept, but the last several chapters of the book become confused as Matthew attempts to seduce Stephane before and during a trip Matthew makes with him which is tracing a trip Allan took with his parents and a woman to whom he was attracted.
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