Alex Clark Martin Bauman: A Novel by David Leavitt (Little, Brown) The confessional genre, the colossal growth area in non-fiction of recent years, has attracted a healthy readership and a rather unhealthy amount of critical disdain. Why, detractors protest, must writers shine a light on the shabby corners of their lives simply because they have the professional know-how to do so? From the writers’ corner comes the well-rehearsed reply that they can do nothing else with their experiences: like the shark, they must keep swimming, or die.
What then are we to make of a novel that seeks to imitate this genre, and takes as its subject the very business of literary creation? In Martin Bauman, David Leavitt pretends to be a writer writing about writing – although his narrator does little but talk about himself. This amounts to a vicious parody of the vacuousness and arbritrariness of literary reputation – and, by extension, of creativity itself. Which is not to say that it works. It helps if a parody is funny, and Leavitt – or Bauman – rarely is. Instead of humour we get almost 500 pages of minutely drawn, exhaustively and exhaustingly nuanced self- examination. During the course of this mammoth whack of prose we follow Bauman from his days as a writing student, under the tutelage of the scathing icon Stanley Flint, to his emergence as part of a New York literary bratpack. “Flint’s first principle” is “Get on with it!”, with a rider that warns of the dangers of literary “throat-clearing”. Bauman does anything but get on with it and nothing but clear his throat. One hopes that Leavitt, whose previous work has demonstrated a delicacy of wit and a nicely understated sense of irony, has not accompanied his narcissistic alter ego too far down this particularly pedestrian route.