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A review by halschrieve
Our Young Man by Edmund White
3.0
Okay, so I love Edmund White, and I love that at his age he can still sit down and write a sexy, dramatic story about gay men in the 1970s and 1980s.
White says this is supposed to be a Dorian Gray type story, where the narrator is undone by his moral degeneration or something of the kind. It deals with the fear gay men have of getting old and becoming undesirable or subjects of contempt, while also covering a lot of ground in terms of painting a fun, baroque portrait of gay life in the middle of the 20th century and acting as a kind of pressed-tin, distorted oral history of different periods in gay life. The main character, Guy, spends the latter half of the book being deeply unlikable and doing things that one would hope they personally would never do. He inherits from a lover who dies of AIDS--who Guy never loved, despite a passionate scene where the lover defends Guy as his real family. He betrays his lover who is in prison. He fucks a newly-out gay 20 something and ambiguously ruins the young man's life, or at least sets him up with a host of personal emotional problems.
It's a fun book, it's a historical book, and it represents White's mature fictional prose style (though I love his more frilly early fiction and spiky nonfiction writing).
The reason I Did Not give it five stars is this: White is pretty racist. He has a fetish for playing with racial stereotypes around black and Latino men, and while his character is clearly not meant to be a good person, these stereotypes grow distracting and begin to resemble a Mapplethorpian racialized fantasy by the end of the book. The Latin grad student who was clearly intelligent and who got into money trouble in order to be with Guy becomes a tough-talking, simple-minded tattooed masculine stalker in prison. No woman character of color in the book speaks more than twice, and there are very few female characters at all. I don't really know what's up with White in this regard, but I want to submit to him the concept of rereading Tennessee Williams' Desire And The Black Masseur one time less per week and instead having twenty minutes of mindful meditation.
White says this is supposed to be a Dorian Gray type story, where the narrator is undone by his moral degeneration or something of the kind. It deals with the fear gay men have of getting old and becoming undesirable or subjects of contempt, while also covering a lot of ground in terms of painting a fun, baroque portrait of gay life in the middle of the 20th century and acting as a kind of pressed-tin, distorted oral history of different periods in gay life. The main character, Guy, spends the latter half of the book being deeply unlikable and doing things that one would hope they personally would never do. He inherits from a lover who dies of AIDS--who Guy never loved, despite a passionate scene where the lover defends Guy as his real family. He betrays his lover who is in prison. He fucks a newly-out gay 20 something and ambiguously ruins the young man's life, or at least sets him up with a host of personal emotional problems.
It's a fun book, it's a historical book, and it represents White's mature fictional prose style (though I love his more frilly early fiction and spiky nonfiction writing).
The reason I Did Not give it five stars is this: White is pretty racist. He has a fetish for playing with racial stereotypes around black and Latino men, and while his character is clearly not meant to be a good person, these stereotypes grow distracting and begin to resemble a Mapplethorpian racialized fantasy by the end of the book. The Latin grad student who was clearly intelligent and who got into money trouble in order to be with Guy becomes a tough-talking, simple-minded tattooed masculine stalker in prison. No woman character of color in the book speaks more than twice, and there are very few female characters at all. I don't really know what's up with White in this regard, but I want to submit to him the concept of rereading Tennessee Williams' Desire And The Black Masseur one time less per week and instead having twenty minutes of mindful meditation.