Attractive Numbers
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The Indian Clerk
by David Leavitt
Bloomsbury. 496 pages, $24.95

DAVID LEAVITT’S NEW NOVEL, The Indian Clerk, is his second historical novel. His first, While England Sleeps (1993), explored the troubled romance of two young men in World War II London. His latest is also set in wartime England, but it is the England of World War I, and his scope is much more ambitious. Leavitt uses a large cast of characters, almost all of them historical figures, to examine, not just romance, but also the complex tangle of friendship, sexuality, familial duty, vocation, and national identity that defines all human relationships.