Blackstone’s protagonist is Peter Hapworth, a feckless adjunct professor of creative writing who engages in a whirlwind courtship of and marriage to Izzy Conway, a glamorous sommelier and television personality. Leavitt’s command of his craft stands in sharp contrast to Charles Blackstone, whose first novel, Vintage Attraction (Pegasus, $24.95), is a slapdash, irritating affair. There’s something essentially cautious in Leavitt’s tale he seems content to paint in small, muted colors, and the sudden violence of the denouement seems almost like it dropped in from some other novel. Pete has something of Lambert Strether’s willful obliviousness, but without, in the end, an equivalent moral grandeur or psychological acuity.
The progressively sinister web of deceit and manipulation that Leavitt constructs echoes Henry James’s intricate tales of Americans undone abroad. He’s an earnest Midwestern auto salesman who at first believes that “most people are exactly what they appear to be,” but the novel’s dramatic arc will trace his education and eventual disillusionment. This marvelously dramatic setting - Casablanca by way of Graham Greene - is the backdrop for a story related in retrospect by Pete Winters. In neutral Lisbon in 1940, two expatriate couples find themselves awaiting passage to America among a cauldron of desperate refugees fleeing the Nazi advance. The most sophisticated of these three efforts is David Leavitt’s The Two Hotel Francforts(Bloomsbury, $25), a deftly executed piece of literary historical fiction. So here we have a trio of novels by American men, each attempting to establish a beachhead on the blasted and heavily fortified landscape of love and romance.
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