Matinee, Robert Steiner's captivating new novel, gives us a wild, modern-day in the New England woods, where a cosmopolitan array of guests revels in numerous couplings and uncouplings, movies, music, and murder. (Or is it suicide?) The party's conspicuously absent host, O.T. Stone, has retreated to his study, where he holds a nameless hostage at gunpoint throughout the night.

The contemporary story is interrupted by Steiner's imaginative reinventions of historical and literary episodes: After the death of Don Quixote, Sancho Panza becomes Don Juan's valet; Casanova's exploits are told through a series of love letters; Casanova confounds Mozart in a villa outside of Prague; later, he meets Don Juan, and the two great lovers confront each other beside the Seine in Paris.

Steiner skillfully weaves these parables into one another, and into the contemporary story (culminating in O.T. Stone's appearance in a film about Casanova), with surprising results. Matinee is a fast-paced, erotic, and multilayered novel—a literary mosaic which includes paintings, puzzles, sing-alongs, drawings, intermissions, a Chinese detective, Federico Fellini, foreplay, climaxes, and provocative revelations about memory and desire, fate and freedom, imagination and truth, life and fiction.