The Sex Squad
David Leavitt
Reading The Sex Squad is, for the most part, like spending a pleasurable cocktail hour captivated by a master of self-revealing and self-glorifying anecdote. You may not always agree with author David Leddick's opinions and may even be appalled by some of the situations he describes, but he delivers them with good humor, great brio and a vivid sense of detail. Nonetheless, a first-rate raconteur, does not a first-rate novelist make and, for all its passing charms, Leddick's second novel, after My Worst Date, simply doesn't hold up as a coherent work of fiction.
Weaving through the backstage milieu of the New York opera and dance world of the 1950s, Leddick holds his own as seamstress of a loosely stitched tapestry of autobiographical reminiscences, imagined incidents, and choice historical tidbits from behind closed dressing room doors (Sir Rudolf Bing, Margot Fonteyn, George Platt Lynes and Lincoln Kirstein are among the real-life figures who make cameo appearances). But Leddick proves ineffective as a true literary couturier. Despite its stylish and compelling patches, The Sex Squad suffers from a lack of whole cloth artistic vision. This is a novel that makes it abundantly clear that fine writing is not necessarily prerequisite to a good read.
The bulk of The Sex Squad takes place in 1957, when ballet-crazed 17-year-old Harry Potter and his equally obsessed mother abandon the parochial climes of Michigan for the cultural hotbed of Manhattan. As it turns out, Leddick does his best work when he focuses on the culture, the hot bed scenes pale in comparison.
Narrating in hindsight from the 1980s, Harry's first-person memories of his magic year straddling the bohemian life of a poor dancer in Greenwich Village and the glittery world of the stars and patrons he mingled with on a daily basis frequently leap from the oft-trod ground they cover because Leddick invests his young hero with as much a passion for dance as for dish. Like his main character, Leddick was in the Metropolitan Opera ballet in the 1950s, and his most elegant writing focuses on the physical rigors and emotional fulfillment not of sex, but of dance:
"Inside was the urge to float through the air, turn and twist your leg high, point your feet down to make sharp, pointed shapes like arrows to lead your body through the air...Oh, it was wonderful. Dancing—the perfect art. Consuming itself as it happens. Leaving you only with the feeling of having seen...or felt...moments of actually doing what you once only dreamed of doing."
To read such well-turned descriptive prose could, in itself, convince the reader of Harry's—and Leddick's—sincerity when he frequently wonders whether he could ever love another person as passionately as he loves the sensation of dancing. And when the reader notes the contrast between Leddick's dance writing and his sex writing, one is altogether convinced that these doubts are well-founded.
Harry's affairs with Rex and Illy, two other members of the titular sex squad—a nickname for the small cadre of male Met dancers with bodies svelte enough to appear in scanty loincloths for a production of Aida—form the even more scanty plot that connects most of the book's episodic segments. They are rendered in a howlingly awful mix of soft porn and pure corn. There are euphemisms like "making bamboola" and "the big nasty"; awkward genital metaphors—"His penis was saying hello. I touched it. It said hello very clearly, nodding and getting to its feet"; and redundantly overblown action sequences—"The more he relished those deep plunges into my flesh, the more pleasure I had...seeking to get that cock in as deeply as possible so every little millimeter could have the pleasure of being immersed in warm interior flesh."
Beyond the lack of grace in its sexual language, The Sex Squad is more seriously marred by the cynical, graceless attitudes about sex and love espoused by Harry in the book's opening and closing passages. These sections feature a middle-aged Harry, who has long ago left the dance world to and become a successful doctor, visiting the hospital bed of his long ago paramour, Illy, who is dying of AIDS. Harry has essentially renounced his gay life as too much romantic turmoil to bear. He's married a woman—"my body responds to her body and we get it on"—and raised two daughters. "It has nothing to do with fulfilling deep-seated emotional goals," he notes "...There's no place in my life for love."
Harry also exhibits an appalling disdain for what most liberal-minded readers would consider progress on the sexual liberation front; he pines nostalgically for a time when "To enter the ranks of admitted homosexuals required a certain level of physical beauty and noticeable personality. As with everything else, standards have slipped, and everyone including your Uncle Fred is out of the closet."
Because the sections that present these attitudes are little more than a sketchy, hastily paced framework for the flashbacks of the central narrative, they not only fail to imbue Harry with the sense of tragic complexity that Leddick is apparently striving for, they also inadvertently taint the rest of the book's amiable cocktail chatter. Though frequently diverting, The Sex Squad ends up leaving you with the unlikely aftertaste of a curdled martini.
