The Page Turner was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1998. The novel is set at a summer music festival in Rome, where eighteen-year-old Paul Porterfield — a talented but not exceptional piano student — is assigned to turn pages for Richard Kennington, a world-famous concert pianist. Paul becomes obsessed with Kennington: with his playing, his personality, his physical presence, and the question of whether the older man reciprocates his attraction.
Leavitt explores the particular eroticism of the master-student relationship in the arts: the intimacy of watching someone perform at close range, the power differential that makes attraction both dangerous and irresistible, the ambiguity of whether one desires the person or the art they embody. Paul cannot separate his admiration for Kennington’s musicianship from his attraction to the man himself — and the novel suggests that this confusion is not a failure of understanding but the nature of aesthetic experience.
The musical world provides a rich setting: the politics of concert careers, the anxiety of performance, the complicated social dynamics of festivals and competitions, and the particular culture of classical music (traditional, hierarchical, aesthetically conservative) through which queer desire must navigate.
The novel is briefer and more focused than Leavitt’s other work — almost a novella in its concentration on a single relationship and a limited timeframe. This compression gives it intensity: the summer festival becomes a pressure cooker in which feelings that might develop slowly in ordinary life are forced to declare themselves.
Collecting The Page Turner
First edition (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1998): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$30
- Very good/very good: $5–$15