Word: leavitt
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According to Paul J. Macdonald, manager and co-owner of Leavitt and Pierce on 1316 Mass. Ave., humidors can run from...
This controversy provides the impetus for the surreal plot of The Term Paper Artist. In the novella, the character named David Leavitt, distraught over the suppression of his novel and suffering from writer's block as a result, hides out at his father's house in Los Angeles and does halfhearted research at the UCLA library for a novel he's pretty sure he will never write. By chance he meets Eric, an attractive undergraduate, who invites him to his apartment to share some marijuana. Hoping for sex, Leavitt learns that the seductive Eric has a more complex transaction...
...Simple as that," the Leavitt character notes, "I became an industry," turning out term papers for seven college boys who hear of his service--and his terms--and seek him out anyway. His last client is a devout Mormon named Ben, who is so desperate for a good grade that will get him into law school that he is "willing to do things I'll be ashamed of for the rest of my life." Leavitt perks up at that "things." Ben believes both the cheating and the required method of payment are sins. "After all," Leavitt muses, "none...
...other two novellas in Arkansas, The Wooden Anniversary and Saturn Street, are perfectly fine, filled with interesting characters and mordant wit. But The Term Paper Artist is spectacularly effective fiction, an oblique and very funny commentary on Leavitt's real-life travails. Having been accused of plagiarism, he spins out a story in which he happily abets plagiarists...
...Writers often disguise their lives as fiction," Leavitt tells Ben near the end of the novella. "The thing they almost never do is disguise fiction as their lives." This is not quite true. Paul Theroux offered an invented autobiography last year in My Other Life, and Philip Roth did much the same in 1993 in Operation Shylock. The Term Paper Artist is as playful as those works and every bit as good...