Book Review: "Arkansas" By David Leavitt

The following is an excerpt of a previously unpublished book review I wrote in 1997.

Arkansas: Three Novellas by David Leavitt (Houghton Mifflin)
Reviewed by Charles Michael Smith

David Leavitt's Arkansas, a collection of three novellas, is further proof that he is one of America's brightest young fiction writers.

It is also proof that he is not afraid to stir up controversy. At the beginning of the first novella, "The Term Paper Artist," Leavitt refers to the controversy that involved himself and the late English poet Sir Stephen Spender who "sued me over a novel I had written because it was based in part on an episode in his life."

This time it is "The Term Paper Artist" that has created what New York Daily News columnists Rush and Molloy have described as a "litquake." They stated that Esquire magazine decided not to publish an excerpt of the novella out of fear that the references to male sexual organs and oral sex would offend readers and advertisers.

The whole issue is much ado about nothing. There is indeed frank language in the novella, but nowhere are there the kind of explicit sex scenes found in hard-core gay skin magazines. Leavitt discreetly turns away from such depictions. For example, here is how he ends one such scene: "Then for about half an hour, though he made other noises, he didn't speak a word."

"The Term Paper Artist," which uses a lot of autobiographical details from Leavitt's life including the use of his name as the name of the first-person narrator, is about a young writer who enters into a "prostitutional" arrangement with seven heterosexual male college students. The arrangement was that he would ghostwrite their term papers in exchange for sex, thereby becoming "an industry." Whether this term paper arrangement actually happened to Leavitt is unclear. (Leavitt teases the reader by having his namesake say that "Writers often disguise their lives as fiction. The thing they almost never do is disguise fiction as their lives.") His namesake admits that it is "unethical" and "goes against everything I believe in." But it beats sitting in the UCLA library doing research on the new novel about the scandal that resulted when a homosexual brothel was discovered by the police in 1889 London.

In Arkansas David Leavitt probes the hearts, minds, and souls of the people he knows best--the suburban upper middle class.