Borrowed Glamour. "The Boy" by Julian Davies. [review]

Abstract

It is Davies’s failure to think his way fully into the material that keeps "The Boy" middling warm rather than hot. Erotic fiction, after all, is a kind of pastoral, and its demands on the imagination of the writer are exacting. You can see Davies trying for the rapt quality of James Salter’s "A Sport and a Pastime" or John Scott’s "What I Have Written", but he never gets there.