The discrepancy between the two provides the engine of this novel.
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His beauty remains his invincible armour, and he conserves his beauty with the careful attention of a concierge locked in a sunless box by the doors which open to a graceful, sun dappled mansion. (He can pass for 25 when he is close to 40 – some achievement.) But somehow Guy’s interior always remains slightly bland, as if he lacks some key human ingredient, even the ability to feel hurt, or be warmed by love. There are elements of the fairy story in Guy’s ascension to the top ranks of male models just as there is something unreal in the way his looks never change.
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He always wants to sit at the top table, not because he thinks it’s where the wit or intelligence or even beauty lies – but it is where you see the machine roiling in all its harsh ugliness – beauties being picked up and put down – money made, money lost – but all in the most glamorous, if slightly sticky, surroundings. But White is an unabashed snob like Capote, like Proust. This would have been a different book entirely if Guy had been picked up and put down rather the worse for wear, which is the tale of most young beauties past their sell-by date. If you are lucky as a commodity, you are rewarded handsomely for being that moment’s object of desire.
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Or it could be seen as a nod to what happens in every metropolitan centre – raw beauty is harvested and brought into production, not so much prostituted as put to work. This could be seen as a salute to Balzac and his famous coupling of handsome provincial Eugene de Rastignac with the worldly homosexual Vautrin in nineteenth century Paris. The story is paper thin (but then so were Nancy Mitford’s books.) Guy, pronounced in the French style to rhyme with key, comes from a poor family in Clermont Ferrand but manages to get to Paris where his entirely covetable beauty is snapped up by a worldly wise, seen-it-all-before merchant of human souls. Our Young Man is a book about the evanescence of physical beauty, the heartlessness of fashion, the importance – or irrelevance – of love – the abject nature of sex yet its utter necessity – all served with a side dish of commentary on how humans function, deceive one another and themselves, often at the same time. This might be more than some people want to know, or it may be exactly what some people want to know. He also has the inside track on the logistics or mechanics of man on man sex. White’s wit is different, more laconic, more louche. She used one to critique the other, making up books that weren’t quite farces but had the delicacy of a soufflé laced with cyanide. In her case it was the dreariness of the English as against the sparkling wit and treachery of the French. Henry James explored this as well as the great comic writer Nancy Mitford. This allows White to have a lot of fun with differing cultural mores – the earnestness of Americans as against the rather narrow “high culture” that the French believe gives them a special dispensation to grimace at the barbarism of everyone around them. 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.
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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.)
CHUBBY GAY MEN AND SKINNY GUYS SERIES
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.