In Passionate Spectator, memoirist Peter Leroy and his wife Albertine are living by the skin of their teeth in Manhattan. Casting about for a source of income, Peter purchases a book from a homeless peddler, Creative Self-Promotion for Taxidermists, hoping he can adapt its techniques to promote his fledgling business: Memoirs While You Wait. That book opens into a beguiling journey from fiction to truth and back again, involving Peter, his childhood friend Matthew Barber (who is undergoing emergency heart surgery), and Peter's witty, urbane alter-ego, Bertram W. Beath--an erotic opportunist and "passionate spectator"of life's pageant.