by Kent Chadwick

Boyhood Lovely and Lost

llan Stein was the avant-garde writer Gertrude Stein's nephew and he is the symbol of boyhood lovely and lost in Seattle writer Matthew Stadler's fourth and finest novel, entitled Allan Stein. Love of boyhood, both idyllic and erotic, has been an overarching theme in all of Stadler's novels.

The brilliant Landscape: Memory (1990) was a luminous coming-of-age story set in 1914 San Francisco, and which celebrated the sexual awakening and love affair between two high school boys. One of the sub-plots in the symphonically structured The Dissolution of Nicholas Dee (1993) concerns the sexually innocent 33-year-old Nicholas Dee's growing fascination and love for a 15-year-old boy. The Sex Offender (1994) is a gay dystopia in which a teacher is relocated, stripped of his identity, and sentenced to behavioral modification treatment for having had sex with one of his 12-year-old male students.

Allan Stein begins in a similar vein. The narrator, a high school teacher living in present-day Seattle, has been forced to take a paid leave of absence following a false accusation of sexual misconduct with one of his students. But "only minutes after hearing the accusation I was already planning a seduction. I cannot exaggerate how subtle and profound these chameleon confusions were.... I pursued him. In the end I succeeded in committing the crime I had been falsely accused of. The parents never found out (no one did). As it turned out, sex was precisely what the boy wanted, and he became very much the happy, satisfied child [his parents] hoped he would be...."

This is a troubling fictional justification of adult-adolescent sex that Stadler does not choose to contradict elsewhere in the novel. Stadler's narrators in Allan Stein and The Sex Offender make the argument that their relationships were love affairs not molestations because of the boys' desires and their own affection. But our contemporary social consensus is that such relationships are wrong because of the imbalance in power between an adult and a minor, regardless of the feelings they share. Stadler's characters, however, believe that in some ways the power equation favors the children. The historical Allan Stein becomes, by happenstance for the narrator, an embodiment of such boyhood power.

A dinner conversation (this novel is bright with well-realized conversations) begins this idealization, when his friend Herbert, a well-known art museum curator, tells the narrator about his hypothesis (a Stadler invention) that Allan Stein might have been Picasso's model for the masterpiece Boy Leading a Horse. In this 1906 painting a naked boy strides ahead of a magnificent gray horse. The boy's arm is outstretched in a commanding gesture, but intriguingly there is no bridle on the horse and no reins in the boy's hand. Herbert suspects that members of the Stein family still living in France might have some Picasso studies of Allan that could confirm this hypothesis. Unbelievably though, Herbert allows the narrator to impersonate him on a hunt for the Picasso drawings in Paris, and the plot commences.

The imposter Herbert stays with a hospitable Parisian family that encourages his quest for the drawings. Significantly, it is the mother of the family who is most able to describe the attraction of the boy in Picasso's painting, and by extension the narrator's attraction to all boys including her 15-year-old son, Stéphane. "He has a tremendous power because he is nothing yet, no one, and so he has the power in him to be a god, like all children do, you see? If Picasso had painted a man leading the horse, just imagine it. This man would be someone, some man who will never be a god at all, just a man, without the limitless power this boy has."

Stadler builds great dramatic tension as the impostor Herbert pursues both Stéphane and the memory of Allan Stein. Stadler masterfully intertwines diary entries from Allan's nanny, letters from his parents to Aunt Gertrude, an imagined encounter between Allan and Picasso, letters from the first girl Allan fell in love with, and finally letters from Allan's embittered son decades after Allan's abandonment and death. This assortment of texts and perspectives makes the novel a rich, multi-textured work. Sadly, it also reveals that as an adult Allan had realized none of the promise of his youth. "The final thirty years were little more than the working out of a failed equation." Allan's life is ruefully summed up in the quote by Aunt Gertrude that Stadler has chosen as the perfect epigraph for his theme: "What is the use of being a boy if you grow up to become a man, what is the use?"

Stadler's prose is customarily beautiful, but seems even more burnished because of his return to a more realistic style, which jettisons the less successful, fantastic elements of his two previous novels. The characters in Allan Stein are vivid and more truly interesting than the opéra bouffe role players in The Sex Offender or the enigmatic but bloodless secondary characters in The Dissolution of Nicholas Dee.

With his sensuous and intelligent writing, his obsessions, and his explorations of memory, Stadler has the makings of an American Marcel Proust. To test that comparison listen to these sinewy associations of sense and memory reaching back and forth in time about one of Proust's elemental subjects: "I remember her standing in a meadow of bluebells, this particular girl--not a farm girl at all, really, as it is my mother I am recalling, whose image was suggested by the falseness of the beach at Agay--sunshine raking the steep wooded hills that bordered 'our' meadow, and a goat she taunted to rage so that she might show me how to vault over the animal as it charged, placing her two hands on the nubs of its horns, her legs in an elegant V sailing over the befuddled goat..." Proust's great accomplishment was a simultaneously dissection of his own memory and of the workings of his social class. Adept at analyzing individual memory, it will be interesting to see if Stadler continues his realistic social portraits but with an even wider lens.

Kent Chadwick is participating in the 1999 Jack Straw Writer's Program.