While England Sleeps,'' on incidents from Spender's memoirs, has clearly taken its toll, but, glib as this may sound, adversity appears to have done Mr. Leavitt good. And if I get a good grade. . . .'' It's an idea with legs, and soon a number of good-looking U.C.L.A. airheads are turning in beautifully written papers. Los Angeles is the perfect setting for such a cheerfully depraved story, and even though the sex scenes are actually less explicit than some of Mr. Leavitt's previous ones, you can see how the whole concept might spook a nervous magazine editor. And for once he isn't writing sex scenes as a public service. As juicy as the comedy is, though, he doesn't sustain it.
Writers often disguise their lives as fiction.
Mr. Leavitt has to tell us. By the end of the story, Nathan has stolen her handsome Italian lover, and Celia has run away and been reincarnated as a cow. But I can't imagine that many of them amount to much as novelists.