''Allan Stein'' is a 1999 novel by

Matthew Stadler Matthew Stadler (born 1959) is an American author who has written six novels and received several awards. Stadler has compiled four anthologies about literature, city life and public life. His essays, which have been published in magazines and mu ...

. Its epigraph is a quotation from writer

Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874 – July 27, 1946) was an American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the Allegheny West neighborhood and raised in Oakland, California, Stein moved to Paris ...

: ''"What is the use of being a boy if you grow up to become a man, what is the use?"'' The novel won the

Lambda Literary Award Lambda Literary Awards, also known as the "Lammys", are awarded yearly by Lambda Literary to recognize the crucial role LGBTQ writers play in shaping the world. The Lammys celebrate the very best in LGBTQ literature.The awards were instituted i ...

for Gay Men's Fiction and the Richard and Hilda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the

American Academy of Arts and Letters The American Academy of Arts and Letters is a 300-member honor society whose goal is to "foster, assist, and sustain excellence" in American literature, music, and art. Its fixed number membership is elected for lifetime appointments. Its headqu ...

Plot

In the novel's first section, the protagonist loses his teaching job due to a false accusation of seducing a 10th-grade student. He then seduces the student, and having done so, departs on a trip to France. In France he assumes the name of a friend, 'Herbert', and pretends to be a curator looking for lost drawings of Allan Stein. The protagonist uses his new identity to become close to the son of his hosts, a moody 15-year-old named Stéphane. The narrator

projects A project is any undertaking, carried out individually or collaboratively and possibly involving research or design, that is carefully planned to achieve a particular goal. An alternative view sees a project managerially as a sequence of even ...

onto Stéphane an idealized memory of his own childhood, when he visited France with his mother at age 16. Enchanted by Stéphane's mother as well as her son. After two weeks, the narrator succeeds in making Stéphane his lover, and the two run off together to the South of France. But Stéphane returns to his parents when he discovers that the narrator has lied about his name. It is only at this point that the reader discovers the real name of the narrator: Matthew.

Inspirations

Allan Stein was a real historical character: he was Gertrude Stein's nephew and the subject of a portrait by

Pablo Picasso Pablo Ruiz Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and Scenic design, theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the 20th ce ...

1906 Events January–February * January 12 – Persian Constitutional Revolution: A nationalistic coalition of merchants, religious leaders and intellectuals in Persia forces the shah Mozaffar ad-Din Shah Qajar to grant a constitution, ...

, when Allan was 11. On choosing this obscure figure as the subject of his book, Stadler has said, "Allan was a kid surrounded by powerful adults, and my work has always focused on kids living in the midst of adult projections." In a 1999 interview, Stadler explained that this plot-turn offered him a way to look more closely at the relationship between an author and a fiction. He said that giving the fictional narrator his own first name left him "overwhelmed emotionally. I recognized that my inability to arrive at a right relation to these fantasies came from how nervous, hesitant, and defensive I felt about my presence as a writer of this. To have a character address me directly was very chastening." This self-reckoning, he says, helped him conclude what had become a four-book inquiry. "I had been working for four books around this question, trying to achieve some kind of relation to the image of the boy. ''Allan Stein'' brought together so many strands of my work, I thought maybe I could

neutron bomb A neutron bomb, officially defined as a type of enhanced radiation weapon (ERW), is a low-yield thermonuclear weapon designed to maximize lethal neutron radiation in the immediate vicinity of the blast while minimizing the physical power of the b ...

the whole boy-mythology construct by somehow exhausting the territory of my fantasy."

References

About a Boy: An Interview With Matthew Stadler
by Hugh Garvey

by Bruce Bawer

by Michael Miller

External links

Pablo Picasso, ''Portrait of Allan Stein,'' 1906, retrieved November 27, 2008
{{Matthew Stadler 1999 American novels Novels by Matthew Stadler Novels set in France 1990s LGBT literature Sexuality and age in fiction