With the publication of his first collection of short stories, Family Dancing, in 1984, David Leavitt became not only one of the chief proponents of the expanding field of gay fiction but was -- perhaps to his own surprise -- called on to be the spokesman for a generation of writers alienated from the values of post-- World War II America and made skeptical by the Vietnam experience, Watergate, and the national AIDS epidemic. As Leavitt notes in his essay "The New Lost Generation" (1985), his generation found itself on the cusp between the political and social activism of the 1960s and the reactive disillusionment and indifference of the post-Watergate/pre-AIDS 1970s. He has sought, through his short stories and novels, to draw a parallel between the youth of the Jazz Age -- too young to have participated in the cataclysmic events of World War I and consequently alienated from...