Book summary

Peter Levi, at age 19, returns to his summer haunt of Rocky Port, Maine, after a five- year absence. While he was gone, his favorite horned owl died, and when he looks with his mother for a waterfall they both liked, they discover it has been demolished to make way for a highway. When the summer ends, Peter travels to Paris for his junior year abroad at the Sorbonne. But his ideas of French culture clash with the reality of it. The hero of this coming-of-age novel is reputedly modelled on author Mary McCarthy's son.

Media reviews

"The heart of [the book] is a long letter from Peter to his mother, balancing off esthetics against morals, aristocracy against democracy. Peter's mother is the elite, but the law must be for the common; and as Peter vows to reject Rosamund we hear echoes of the inner debate Mary McCarthy has been suffering through for years: how to admire the loathsome virtuous; how to condemn the beautiful unregenerate...No creature more devoid of existential reality ever lived than this so-carefully-documented Peter Lefi...These are all ways of saying that Mary McCarthy, for all her cold eye and fine prose, is an essayist, not a novelist. But then, if we can have nonfiction novels, why not a new McCarthy genre, the ficitonal essay? It is not an unworthy form, taken for what it is."