The time is the summer of 1914. The city of San Francisco is set to open the glorious Panama Pacific International Exhibition as a way of announcing to the world its recovery from the horrors of the 1906 earthquake. Sixteen-year-old Maxwell Field Kosegarten, the precocious and brooding son of a well-to-do eccentric Presidio Heights couple, is keeping an account of the exhibition and his sexual and intellectual awakening in his "memory book." Somehow, he believes, if he can keep his memories organized and intact, things will be more comprehensible.

Matthew Stadler's first novel, Landscape: Memory follows Max through that summer and chronicles his passionate love affair with his best friend Duncan, the two boys' idyllic stay in Bolinas, and their first year at the University of California at Berkeley. The novel is in every way a triumph. It is a historical novel that seems both contemporary and authentic, a philosophical novel that reads like a romance, a coming-of-age novel that manages to avoid cliches, a lyrical novel that stays taut and absorbing.

Shifting Layers

Max is obsessed with how memory works, how one can hold some thought or moment in one's mind without losing it. He attempts to capture a specific moment, a feeling, in a landscape painting that evolves layer on layer, as Max's ideas and attitudes evolve. He wants to capture an evening near Bolinas as he and Duncan stood in the water of the lagoon and watched the sun set.

In a unique move, Stadler has reproduced the various phases of the painting in the book. They are a counterpoint to Max's journal, amplifying and commenting on the words, shifting as Max's memory shifts.

A mere description of the novel runs the risk of making it sound overly intellectual or gimmicky. Nothing could be further from the truth. As much as Max would like to be rational and controlled, he is passionate. His world is constantly being encroached on by disaster and uncertainty—first by the Great Earthquake which he remembers vividly, then by the rapidly shifting 20th century and World War I. His greatest obsession, alongside the nature of memory, is not philosophical but sexual.

The inclusion of Max's painting as it progresses, rather than just taking up space or making the book more "visually interesting," forms another layer of complexity whose absence would diminish the story's impact. I came to understand and empathize with Max through the combination of his words and his art, no more from one than the other.

The painting, too, is a metaphor for memory and time, a dynamic, shifting thing made up of simultaneously existing layers. Everything that happened is contained in it.

"My painting gets thicker with each layer. They all stay present, lurking in the surface. These pages turn, flipping past. They layer in only on the surface I make by memory...," Max writes.

Contemporary Characters

Stadler has also managed to create a very believable period aura not by larding on the details (though the ones present seem quite accurate and well chosen) but by presenting characters who seem so rooted in their time and yet so contemporary and quirky. Landcape: Memory has enough choice, fleshed—out characters to populate a dozen of the trendy, half-baked books that pass for novels.

Max's mother and father are quite a pair, for starters. She is a beautiful, emancipated woman who calls Max "Pumpkin," models for the statue of Winged Victory at the Fair, and takes Max for picnics and painting expeditions. His father is an ornithologist who calls Max "Little Fish" and disappears into the woods, tramping forward, oblivious to his wife's growing interest in Duncan's father.

Then there's Max and Duncan's friend Flora, a thoroughly "modern" teenager who choreographs Isadora Duncan-inspired dances and tells Max she thinks what's happening between him and Duncan is "completely natural, no matter what society says." Duncan himself is such a strong character that Max's love and obsession for him are almost palpable. Half-Persian and half-American, Duncan's instinctiveness and vigor both complement and contradict Max's introspection. The friction and frisson that result are erotic and memorable.

As remarkable as Landscape: Memory is, there are a few rough spots. Stadler has a tendency to write the sex scenes in prose that tries to mimick the rhythm of the sex act. The long, breathy sentences that lead to climax work the first time around, but seem artificial on a return appearance. Still, the failings are minor when compared to the accomplishment.

Recommendations for books are only as good as the recommender's taste, so here's the test. Although it's very different from them, Landscape: Memory gave me the same feeling of enjoyment and excitement that The Swimming Pool Library, Dancer from the Dance, and The Carnivorous Lamb did. Each brought me into a world and kept me there despite all the distractions a modern reader must endure. Each worked as story and as metaphor. Each made me want to go back to page one when I had finished them and start all over again.