He chooses a very clever ploy, making the most of the decades he spent in France by taking as his lead character a French male model of impeccable, almost Dorian Grey like beauty who makes it big in New York. He understands the power of gossip or dish as he might call it and easily the best part of his thirteenth novel is the way the entire plot is underwritten by a life time’s observation of humans at play – more specifically gay men at play, at rest, in rut, in moments of melancholy.

But then the best part of White has always been his sharp wit, his propensity for bon mots and his astute, savvy take on American mores, American lust, American pathos. His biography on Genet is scholarly and readable, an elusive mix for so many nonfiction pedants. White is at least as good a nonfiction writer as a fiction writer. Then, seizing the historic moment, he helped limn in the stark landscape of death and desire as AIDS entered the picture – The Farewell Symphony (1997.) He went on to enlarge the genre with a series of books that surveyed the landscape of homoerotic desire – literally when he co-authored The Joys of Gay Sex (1977), journalistically when he toured America just as gay desire lit up the boogie nights in States of Desire (1980). His seminal A Boy’s Own Story virtually created the new category of gay fiction in 1982. Peter Wells reviews Our Young Man by Edmund White.Ĭan an author write too much? A glance down the inside page of Edmund White’s new novel discloses either a staggering productivity (13 novels, six works of nonfiction, three biographies and four memoirs) or an author’s unstoppable urge to create.

A previous life edmund white review