Childish Loves

Narrator Benjamin Markovits helps to publish the fictional memoirs of Lord Byron, written by a disgraced and now dead teacher, Peter Sullivan. Struck by the memoirs' recurring themes of sexual predation and innocence lost, he seeks to determine what of Sullivan's own life was contained in this ostensibly well-researched retelling of Lord Byron's romantic and marital misadventures. The narrator (whose name invites questions about fiction and biography) is drawn into an investigation of a student-teacher sex scandal when he interviews Sullivan's family, colleagues, and possible victim. The author Markovits (Imposture) keeps an emotional distance and never makes clear the narrator's motivation for his search. The prose is most engaging in the fictionalized memoirs, which effectively reproduce the tone of 19th-century literature yet offer a more modern, uncensored glimpse at the scandals and sexual relations in Byron's life, including those "punishable by death."