Edmund White (1940–2025)

Sometimes it seems nothing changes and at other times everything does. In this novel we are confronted with these two realities: the comforting illusion of the States in the 50s and the gross and terrible ways homosexuality was treated. Through the lens of Bunny we see the tension growing up as a gay boy in a heteronormative society where all his impulses will be denatured and criminalised. The gentle slope that we see him climb is a testimony to how far gay rights have come. A shining, raw show more light onto an epoch. show less

Edmund White’s last published fiction is a novel of sexual obsession, like some of his earliest books. But, in his eighties, he doesn’t take it quite so seriously. When octogenarian patrician ballet queen Aldwych West becomes infatuated with the brilliant young French-Canadian dancer August, White is quite prepared to share the reader’s sense of how absurd the situation is, particularly when West’s Proustian niece-by-marriage Ernestine makes a play for August herself, and the comedy show more turns rather dark.

There seem to be a lot of in-jokes here that you would have to be a balletomane and a New York socialite to appreciate, and there are also positively 1970s quantities of (deliberately grotesque) sex-scenes punctuating the text: White clearly doesn’t need to care any more at this point in his life whom he might upset, and is having fun going too far wherever he likes.

Insofar as there is a message here, it seems to be to remind us that the power of the idea of love and sex goes on long after our ability to pursue it in practice. Or perhaps simply that there’s no fool like an old fool…

Fun, up to a point, but not for the squeamish. show less

Edmund White is in an unusually jolly mood in this darkly comic satire about a pair of twin sisters from the outskirts of Dallas. It sometimes feels rather like Nancy Mitford's retelling of The Power and the Glory as we follow narrator Yvonne's shameless social climbing from forties Texas suburban nouveau-riche to Parisian gratin against the background of her sister Yvette's equally challenging and oddly parallel quest for humility and saintliness in a Colombian convent (that's "Why-von" and show more "Why-vet" if you're from Texas, BTW).

The set-up gives White the chance to play around with ideas about the problem of attributing "saintliness" to an actual, complex human being who has lived in the modern world, and to wonder whether the religious life doesn't involve just as much social climbing and backstabbing as more worldly careers. And also about how much rewriting and expurgation inevitably goes into any kind of biography.

But the main raison-d'être of the book is clearly to allow White to make fun of his aristocratic friends in France. It's full of ironic observations of the manners of the French upper classes, and wicked little sketches of people we would obviously recognise if we'd moved in the right circles back in the day. And a certain amount of name-dropping-with-hindsight ("Tell me about this Jacqueline Bouvier." — "She's nobody."). I particularly enjoyed White's send-up of the contemporary music world — Yvonne starts to hold musical salons, inviting the most appalling and deafening avant-garde composers she can find, and of course Paris society can't get enough of it.

Very entertaining. show less

Edmund White's lockdown novel starts from a new take on the Decameron idea: a married couple, stuck in their ski-chalet at Sils Maria because the husband has broken his leg, decide to amuse themselves by writing down and then reading aloud to each other accounts of their previous sexual relationships. Both Constance (American and 30) and Ruggero (Sicilian and 70) have previous marriages and a selection of interesting lovers of both genders behind them, but the clou is that back in 2018, when show more he was only forty, Ruggero had a passionate affair with a now-forgotten American writer called Edmund White, then in his late seventies. Yes, that's right, we seem to be in the 2050s, although this clearly isn't science-fiction, and the world has changed remarkably little since the 2020s.

Because Constance and Ruggero are educated people but not novelists, and because they are meant to be writing only for their mutual amusement, White has the excuse to give us a lot of carefully calculated "bad" writing, much of it shamelessly pornographic. At times, especially in Ruggero's teenage memories, he seems to be parodying his own overwrought writing from the Boy's own story era — "At the same moment we had peeled down our mutande, releasing our hard Sicilian cocks like overeager hunting dogs." (Of course, he's only using the Italian word for underpants because it gives him an excuse to make that terrible middle-class-gay-dinner-party joke about mutatis mutandis...)

There is maybe a bit of a serious point behind all the raunchiness, as White reflects on the many ways old age makes both love and sex more difficult without noticeably reducing our need for them. He makes fun of his unappetising old man's body and its weaknesses, but he wants us to understand that he's still as happy to fantasise about hard Sicilian cocks as he was when he was fourteen. And there's also an extended joke about the way it's more often than not the discarded lovers who get to define how you will be remembered after your death...

Fun, although I was getting very bored with Ruggero's arrogant voice by the end of the book. show less