Up-Tempo Tome Too Fast to Be Fulfilling : THE PAGE TURNER, by David Leavitt, Houghton Mifflin, $24, 244 pages

When as practiced a writer as David Leavitt titles a novel “The Page Turner,” the reader can anticipate narrative briskness, smooth pacing and perhaps a simplicity of portraiture. All this--and less--is on display in this slight, superficial exercise by the author most recently of “Arkansas” (three novellas) and “While England Sleeps,” the novel for which Leavitt was criticized (and sued) by Stephen Spender, whose memoirs, he contended, Leavitt had purloined and sexualized in constructing his fiction.

Is it possible that the Spender imbroglio has caused Leavitt to scale down here? Whatever the motivation, “The Page Turner” reads more like a perfunctory survey than a careful depiction of a key interval in a young man’s life. The themes Leavitt reaches for--emerging sexuality, the artistic path, family conflict--are substantial; their expression, however, feels glib and rushed and is conveyed in prose that wavers between the precious and the clumsy. The writing is seldom either direct or insightful, as Leavitt can be at his best.

The protagonist, Paul Porterfield, 18, is an aspiring classical pianist. He is age-appropriately callow, eager and ambitious, but there is a sketchy, almost cipher-like quality to his character that he never sheds. Paul goes through the motions of experience without experience producing any emotion in him--without provoking, deepening or changing him in any visceral way. As the novel opens, Paul is asked to turn pages for a concert given by his idol, the famous pianist Richard Kennington, who at nearly 40 is more seasoned in music and life and would seem, at first, to be an interesting potential artistic and human mentor for the younger man. The other principals are Paul’s mother, Pamela, who is newly separated from Paul’s father and is grasping and emotionally needy--a tedious cliche for the mother of a son who will turn out to be gay--and Kennington’s longtime manager and lover, Joseph Mansourian, who is defined by his excessive attachment to his dying pet dog.

After the introductory concert, Kennington, Paul and Pamela adjourn to Rome, where Kennington performs again and Paul and his mother are on vacation. Paul tracks Kennington down at his hotel, and they fall into an affair that is severely under-motivated. Or, rather, the motivations are stated without ever feeling emotionally or psychologically driven: There is lust; there is Paul’s adoring reverence for the master and his music; there is the possibility of his wanting professional help; there is Kennington’s dissatisfaction with Mansourian and the empty rewards of fame.

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Leavitt has in the past handled sex and sexuality with deftness. Here Paul is presented as “a boy who has never touched, never kissed, another body”--yet when he does, a man’s body at that, he undergoes no conflict and expresses no curiosity, no ambivalence, no particular excitement, even, or joy. It is left to Kennington to wonder, with opacity typical of this novel, whether Paul is in quest of “something even the name of which he didn’t know.” “Even as he pestered, he intoxicated,” Kennington observes elsewhere of Paul. “Even as he annoyed, he beguiled.” But these are vague, summarizing words, words that are thinly attached to behavior or action. After a week of intimacy, the narrator declares, “Paul remained a muddle to Kennington”--to Kennington as to us.

The only real complication Paul feels with regard to the affair is that it be kept from his mother. She, meanwhile, mistakes Kennington’s friendliness as romantic interest. This misunderstanding drives Kennington off, and the novel changes scene to New York, where Paul begins his studies at Juilliard and enters into two similarly unmotivated affairs with older men, one of them Mansourian, whose history with Kennington Paul obtusely ignores for an absurd length of time. This is but one of several instances where the plot relies on information that is implausibly, almost willfully, disregarded by the characters.

But “The Page Turner” is meant to be just that, the opposing argument might go; some logic can be suspended in the cause of speed. What, though, of thoughtful characterization and careful prose? Leavitt has chandeliers shining “loudly,” money “as intertwined as two lovers waking on a winter morning” and anguish “holding exultation in its scissors grip”--to present just a few examples of his murky metaphors and pretentious phrasing. And when Paul comes to his inevitable and not (in concept) uninteresting artistic crisis, this, “the saddest revelation of his life,” feels neither sad nor revelatory.

Among his perplexing choices is the way Leavitt ends the novel, which merely peters out, as though from lack of energy. After having laid in hidden clues, secret affairs and potential betrayals, he fails to deliver the appropriate confrontations, illuminations and discoveries. It is as if, having incompletely imagined his characters, Leavitt has had trouble seeing them through to any kind of resolution.