cover image Sex Squad

Sex Squad

David Leddick. St. Martin's Press, $22.95 (240pp) ISBN 978-0-312-18174-1

The protagonist of Leddick's second novel (after My Worst Date) is Harry Potter, who danced in the corps de ballet for the Metropolitan Opera Company in the 1950s (as did Leddick himself). The story is related mainly in flashback by a present-day Potter--now a doctor, husband and father--who begins and ends the novel at the deathbed of an ex-lover from the Met. Leddick's well-turned phrases and apt aper us never answer the question that drives his novel: What could have turned the youthful Harry's passionate, exclusive, quite open early sexual interest in men into Dr. Potter's dutiful, heterosexual domesticity? By the end, we're told that the dissolution of one ""all-consuming love"" for fellow dancer Rex Ames robbed Harry of all his passion and much of his volition. Leddick gets across the trauma of their breakup, but too little of their love. Young Harry seems so lacking in self-awareness that his story conveys little more than his aesthetic and sexual appreciation for his lovers' bodies. This failure leaves the novel without a center, and the would-be tragedy on which it ends comes across flat and vaguely confusing. (Oct.)