Novelist Carkeet (Error of Our Ways
) revisits the 1962 scandal of his Sonora, Calif., high school in this saucy, fanciful slice of creative nonfiction. Campus Sexpot
was a sexy pulp novel that appeared in the author's small middle-class community when he was 15, reportedly written by a former Sonora high school teacher who fled to Mexico. The steamy roman à clef barely disguised the identity of the real characters involved in the affair between a newly arrived English teacher, Don Kaufield (aka the book's author, Dale Koby) and his 19-year-old, amply endowed student, Linda Franklin. In a nimble narrative, Carkeet transforms the reading of his first smutty book into a shrimpy boy's sexual initiation during the buttoned-up Kennedy years. Carkeet annotates excerpts from the novel, especially the seduction scenes between nubile, willing Linda and her married teacher ("I'll try not to interrupt anymore," promises Carkeet); he expands on notable characters and fills in prurient information. The first Campus Sexpot
ends with a heroic paean to the father-son relationship; Carkeet concludes similarly with a tribute to his upstanding father, who puzzled about people's choice of the dark side: "Why be bad when you can be good?" (Sept. 26)
