title: History of a Pleasure Seeker
author:  Richard Mason 
description: In fictionalized early twentieth-century Amsterdam, Piet Barol, son of a middle-class paper-pusher, secures a job with the plush Vermeulen-Sickerts family as private tutor to a brilliant but cripplingly obsessive young boy. Progress with his pupil is slow, but hot baths, fine vestments inherited from the master of the house, and pointed attention from the masters wife soon have the handsome, charming, and absurdly lucky Piet employing the tastes instilled in him by his late, Parisian mother and assuming the high-society role hed long planned for. Historical references aboundhotel tycoon Maarten Vermeulen-Sickerts is deep into building a tony New York property, his first American venture, when the U.S. market collapsesand they are transporting and evocative. This bildungsroman is as smart as it is seductive, and seductionby finery, older women, successful men, and aged brandiesin the novel is rampant. Readers will savor final scenes aboard the gilded ocean-liner Eugenie and welcome the undercurrent that perhaps Piets good fortune isnt luck at all but a lesson that pleasure exists for those who seek it. --Annie Bostrom
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  A Belated Guest  
    
  
  
  This page copyright © 2001 Blackmask Online.
  
  
  
  
  
  http://www.blackmask.com
  
  
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  # Belated Guest
  
  
  ### William Dean Howells
  
  
  
  
  
  This page copyright © 2001 Blackmask Online.
  
  
  
  
  
  http://www.blackmask.com  
    
  
  
  
  
  
  It is doubtful whether the survivor of any order of things finds
  
  
  compensation in the privilege, however undisputed by his contemporaries,
  
  
  of recording his memories of it. This is, in the first two or three
  
  
  instances, a pleasure. It is sweet to sit down, in the shade or by the
  
  
  fire, and recall names, looks, and tones from the past; and if the
  
  
  Absences thus entreated to become Presences are those of famous people,
  
  
  they lend to the fond historian a little of their lustre, in which he
  
  
  basks for the time with an agreeable sense of celebrity. But another
  
  
  time comes, and comes very soon, when the pensive pleasure changes to the
  
  
  pain of duty, and the precious privilege converts itself into a grievous
  
  
  o