Review: The Body of Jonah Boyd

By David Leavitt. Bloomsbury, 215 pages, $23.95.

David Leavitt's sixth novel, The Body of Jonah Boyd, falls into the bastard Yankee tradition of the academic comedy of manners. Set on the campus of a prestigious California university, the book unfolds in the late 1960s, as bohemian values began to warp the mainstream. Narrator Judith "Denny" Denham works for Ernest Wright, a professor of psychology who runs a psychoanalytic practice out of his garage attic. Over in the main house are Ernest's high-strung wife, Nancy, daughter Daphne and son Ben, and a schnauzer named Little Hans.

Given the times, the Wrights are locked into an appropriately weird sexual pretzel with one another and their colleagues. Daphne sleeps with Ernest's protégé; Ben has a strange flirtation with his mother's best friend. And then there's Denny, who is infatuated with Nancy but spends her Sunday afternoons making rough love to Ernest. Once Leavitt gets this top whirring, it's rather fun to watch it spin. There's something sitcomlike about the novel's pacing, which gives a whiff of what's to come and then manages to make us laugh at it all the same.

But as any child knows, all tops stop spinning. To keep his top going, Leavitt introduces some improbable plot twists that knock this book out of control. The novel's second half contains a murder, a probable suicide, and a plot twist involving an act of plagiarism so obvious it's not even remotely plausible. The title character doesn't appear until the story is well underway, and then he swiftly disappears. A failed novelist who loses his last chance when several notebooks go missing, Jonah Boyd is this book's MacGuffin: he's the crux of the plot but not the meaning of it. Unfortunately, it seems the talented Mr. Leavitt has also gone missing in this occasionally amusing but uninspired novel. (John Freeman)