'Shelter In Place' Is An Ill-Mannered Comedy Of Manners

David Leavitt's new novel, a comedy of manners with the timely title Shelter in Place, comes festooned with blurbs, all of which mention how amazingly funny it is. I never lost my sense of taste with COVID, but I'm beginning to think I may have lost my sense of humor — or, perhaps, my patience with the sort of deliberately, mockably tendentious conversations Shelter in Place is filled with.

I'm a longtime fan of Leavitt's wide-ranging work, beginning with his 1985 debut story collection,and including his controversial 1993 novel, for which he was for its too-close-for comfort similarities with Stephen Spender's life and memoir. I was moved by his 2007 fictionalized portrait of two great mathematicians, and laughed plenty at his transgressive 1997 novella, "The Term Paper Artist"about a writer named David Leavitt who, in the aftermath of a publishing scandal, writes terms papers for UCLA students in exchange for sex.