Solace and Romance

Academia is the setting for a young scholar's voyage of self-discovery in this first novel from Levin, a clinical instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. It's 1966 when grad student Joseph Hillman, 21 and math degree in hand, spots sociology major Lise, also 21, at her job at the train station information counter in Amsterdam. Thus begins a year-long romantic encounter interrupted by Hillman's literary studies at Oxford. The young man's research into the Romantics inspires him to find parallels between his own love affair and those of Byron and Keats, but his sorting out of his ``Romantic aesthetic'' as ``man as exile'' leads mostly to some sluggish ruminations on literary treatises. As Hillman searches for the ``perfect balance of involvement, detachment,'' Levin offers obligatory scenes of punting on the Cam, long poker nights filled with talk of history, philosophy and politics. Hillman continues his attempt to create a myth of the self loosely based on Frazer's The Golden Bough and culminating in Joyce's exemplary ``artist as exile,'' Stephen Dedalus. Lise's studies of the Lunar Society of Birmingham bring her to England, but by then, most readers, tired of Hillman's self-absorbed self-importance, will care little about what the future holds for him and his beloved. (Jan.)