Two Halves of New Haven

As Paul Levinson, a student at Yale Medical School, fights his way through the relentless pressure that the program presents, he struggles to come to terms with his identity as a homosexual who does not really want to become a doctor. A first novel. 12,500 first printing.

This dextrous but ultimately uneven and superficial first novel offers an inside look at the Yale Medical School, from the point of view of a disaffected first-year student, Paul Levinson. As the term starts he is awed by Yale and all that it signifies. Simultaneous to Paul's confrontation with his first cadaver we read his exploration of his own inner workings and heretofore unacknowledged homosexuality. As he pursues gay experiences and embraces a gay identity, he renounces his goal of becoming a doctor in the Ivy League medical establishment and discovers that working as a bartender and making videos allows him to stop feeling like an imposter. An incident early in the story--the unmasking of a fellow student who turns out to have a history of fraudulent identities--serves as Paul's point of reference as he searches for self-knowledge and acceptance. Schecter, a science writer who attended Yale Medical School, has written a funny and sympathetic New Age bildungsroman . But it misses the mark; the author's concerns are too personal, too specific, and the story is less authentic in background, setting and atmosphere than it purports to be.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A vivid, wildly wide-ranging debut from science-writer Schecter, who chronicles the rocky road chosen by a young medical student as he comes to grips with his career aims and his sexuality in one fell swoop. Paul Levinson has come to Yale Medical School largely at the urging of his father, who's footing the bill, but he quickly realizes that his passions lead in other directions altogether. Fascinated by photography, Paul spends as much time with a camera as he does studying and dissecting, even approaching a celebrity physician who stars on a PBS show with the idea that he too might combine medicine and show business. Pressures continue to mount during his first year because of his overwhelming creative and sexual urges, until Paul finally decides to drop out of med school and go his own way. The ``other half'' of New Haven is revealed when he begins to tend bar in a trendy Italian restaurant, meeting a new set of friends who allow him to declare his homosexuality and to take the first giddy steps toward romance and infatuation. He still has a foot in his former world, however, which enables him to act on his creative impulses and ambition by applying to film school; in the end, he even regains his father's respect by having the courage to go his own way. Saucy and superbly detailed, but still troubled by an effervescence that tends toward superficiality, and by energy surges that cause it to spin occasionally out of control. Promising, then, but uneven. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Although unquestionably sincere in its intentions, this first novel about a Yale medical student who decides to chuck it all and embark on that youthful odyssey known as "finding yourself" just misses. The author has an easy, fluent style and a real facility for storytelling, and his characterization is nearly always good, or at least credible. But he fails to handle the plot satisfactorily; after a promising beginning, the narrative degenerates into a loose collection of episodes. By mistake or mistaken design, protagonist Paul Levinson's curiosity about sex and experiments with homosexual love get an amount of space out of proportion to their importance to the story. A little of this ho-hum tale goes a long way. -- A.J. Anderson, GSLIS, Simmons Coll., Boston
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.