Tuesday's book: The Page Turner by David Leavitt (Little, Brown, pounds 15.99)

The Page Turner is David Leavitt's first novel since he suspended his survey of contemporary American bourgeois life in favour of English homosexual mores in the 1930s. The resulting book, While England Sleeps, was withdrawn by Leavitt's former publisher after Stephen Spender threatened legal action. Spender alleged that Leavitt had plagiarised his life - and, worse, bowdlerised his own record of it, World Within World. Though Leavitt saw a revised While England Sleeps reissued in the US with a defensive preface, the damage to his reputation was considerable.

This fourth novel comes only months after Arkansas, David Leavitt's witty collection of three novellas, and weeks after his co-edited collection of homoerotic fiction, Pages Passed from Hand to Hand. Arkansas's pungency did much to correct any sense that Leavitt's time had gone. With The Page Turner, his sure grasp of structure, pace and plot linger. The story, apparently timeless, concerns romantic and sexual confusion, initiation and betrayal.

A sexually naive 18-year-old piano player, Paul Porterfield, aspires to fill concert halls. Instead, he is soon pigeonholed as a reliable page- turner for other performers. One of these, the middle-aged Richard Kennington, initiates an affair with Paul while they holiday in Rome.

This affair ends after the intrusive attentions of Paul's mother, Pamela, who absurdly takes Kennington's interest to be aimed at her. Kennington and Paul both return to New York: the former to his manager and long-term partner; the latter to pursue his studies at the Juilliard school. Though they never meet again, Leavitt deftly develops both stories to show how the affair continues to dictate their lives.

The Page Turner's detailed examination of the world of professional music rings true. Its routine closetry underlies a series of key misunderstandings in the plot. If there is a problem, it is related to the novel's authentic capture of this milieu. Worlds within which tight-lipped aesthetics substitute for sexual honesty endure, but they are small and, ultimately, anachronistic. Where else could Leavitt set another such tale? Arguably only in the antiques business.

E M Forster is cited explicitly, as in all Leavitt's recent work. This further suggests a longing for the relative certainties of Edwardian social conventions - as against the 1990s, with their routine uncertainties, especially for gay men. When a sexual partner of Paul's announces he is HIV-positive, for instance, Paul (elsewhere easily ruffled) decorously accepts the fact.

The Page Turner is pleasurable, orderly, sophisticated - and as readable as its punning title signifies. But I longed for the neatness to unravel, and for the untoward, abrupt, dysfunctional here-and-now to take hold of Paul, of Kennington and, yes, the author himself.