Allan Stein is a most amazing book. From the prologue, it unapologetically takes the reader directly into an uncomfortable place, the realm of pedophilia. Armistead Maupin brushed the subject somewhat in his The Night Listener, but that approach was akin to the proverbial toe placed into the proverbial waters. His main character does not outwardly sexualize his feelings, so the reader can easily rationalize that pedophilia is not even present; that this love is like that of father and son. To follow the metaphor, Matthew Stadler does a proverbial dive directly into the proverbial waters, and emerges all wet yet squeaky clean.
The plot is easy to follow and is, despite the material, darkly amusing. The main character, Matthew, has been put on paid leave from his teaching career on the accusation of having had a sexual relationship with a male tenth-grader. Immediately upon hearing the charges, he fantasizes about the crime he did not commit—an amusing mixture of sex and poetry. Then, he proceeds to make a wrong accusation right, and wonders why he had not thought of seducing the boy before. But now with a steady paycheck, no time commitments, and the taste of boy fresh on his lips, he becomes obsessed. When his friend Herbert mentions a possible trip to Paris in search of Picasso studies of Boy Leading a Horse, in which the boy may actually be Allan Stein, the nephew of the author Gertrude Stein, Matthew is compelled to go. To gain access to the material, he goes as his friend Herbert, a curator.
Matthew arrives in Paris and is welcomed into a family that, conveniently, has a 15 year-old son, Stephane, who rapidly draws Matthew’s attention. Matthew begins a double study of the hard-to-find Allan Stein boyhood, and the live event occurring within Stephane. Their proximity (and little else) leads them ultimately to sex. As the duality of the Allan and Stephane stories interweave, the verb tenses begin to blur, a jarring but very nice effect.
The subject matter is handled superbly. If this book is a morality play against pedophila, it is exquisitely subtle about it. Stephane is largely stereotypical. His clothes lay where each stinking garment is dropped, his true loves are his guitar and basketball, his temper flares when his image (through a bloody nose or muddied clothes) is tarnished. He has rabbit teeth and a weak stomach. Stephane is hardly a dreamboat. In fact, none of the boys that Matthew finds erotic stand out in any particular way. Though sex is common, the reader cannot discern whether any of these boys are gay, because there is almost no emotional element to any of the interaction. Beauty has been narrowed to the innocence of youth and the capture of a boy’s need for a father figure. Once time has chipped the innocence away, so goes the beauty and the magnetism, and the pedophile’s lonely cycle begins again.
And then, the story ends, but it has a strangely familiar feel to it. When Maupin altered plots within The Night Listener for dramatic effect, he called it a “jeweled elephant.” When Star Trek: Voyager begins an episode with the end of the story, they call it “temporal mechanics.” But Stadler has done both at the same time, and with such subtlety and breathtaking effectiveness, that he doesn’t even bother to call attention to it. Why should he? The reader is compelled at book’s end to return to page one and start the search for what had changed.
Only one complaint. Although the family in Paris has no official ties to art, plenty of people who know the real Herbert come to see him. How could Matthew, a social baffoon, pull off this deceptive hob-nobbing in the company of the Dr. Crane’s (of Fraiser) of Paris? Otherwise, great read.