[2] In the novel's first section, the protagonist loses his teaching job due to a false accusation of seducing a 10th-grade student.

In France he assumes the name of a friend, 'Herbert', and pretends to be a curator looking for lost drawings of Allan Stein.

The narrator projects onto Stéphane an idealized memory of his own childhood, when he visited France with his mother at age 16.

I recognized that my inability to arrive at a right relation to these fantasies came from how nervous, hesitant, and defensive I felt about my presence as a writer of this.

Allan Stein brought together so many strands of my work, I thought maybe I could neutron bomb the whole boy-mythology construct by somehow exhausting the territory of my fantasy."