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Our Young Man (2016)

by Edmund White

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1344205,097 (3.37)1
Our Young Man follows the life of a gorgeous Frenchman, Guy, as he goes from the industrial city of Clermont-Ferrand to the top of the modeling profession in New York City's fashion world, becoming the darling of Fire Island's gay community. Like Wilde's Dorian Grey, Guy never seems to age; at thirty-five he is still modeling, still enjoying lavish gifts from older men who believe he's twenty-three---though their attentions always come at a price. Ambivalently, Guy lets them believe, driven especially by the memory of growing up poor, until he finds he needs the lie to secure not only wealth, but love itself. Surveying the full spectrum of gay amorous life through the disco era and into the age of AIDS, Edmund White (who worked at Vogue for ten years) explores the power of physical beauty---to fascinate, to enslave, and to deceive---with sparkling wit and pathos.… (more)
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English (2)  Italian (1)  All languages (3)
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Our Young Man is basically gay Zoolander, except in earnest. It's the story of a model who looks much younger than he is and lives a really very dull, aimless existence for fifty or so pages before the reader gives up and finds something else to read. The prose is ugly, the story both preposterous and uninteresting, and the dialogue is awful. In fact, the prose is so bad that in any long section of narration I would find myself longing for some dialogue, even though I knew the dialogue would be just as torturous. It seems that even with torture, humans crave variety.

I know that Edmund White is a giant of gay literature, but I think I only really enjoyed his first two novels. Maybe he needs to return to writing what he knows, because his imagination let him down in this instance. ( )
  robfwalter | Jul 31, 2023 |
An aimless tale -- written mostly like a stream of consciousness. ( )
  BrianEWilliams | May 30, 2016 |
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Our Young Man follows the life of a gorgeous Frenchman, Guy, as he goes from the industrial city of Clermont-Ferrand to the top of the modeling profession in New York City's fashion world, becoming the darling of Fire Island's gay community. Like Wilde's Dorian Grey, Guy never seems to age; at thirty-five he is still modeling, still enjoying lavish gifts from older men who believe he's twenty-three---though their attentions always come at a price. Ambivalently, Guy lets them believe, driven especially by the memory of growing up poor, until he finds he needs the lie to secure not only wealth, but love itself. Surveying the full spectrum of gay amorous life through the disco era and into the age of AIDS, Edmund White (who worked at Vogue for ten years) explores the power of physical beauty---to fascinate, to enslave, and to deceive---with sparkling wit and pathos.

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