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A review by quirkycynic
Our Young Man by Edmund White
2.0
It's hard for me to get my head around what it is I truly think about Edmund White. I think he's an incredibly talented writer, of course, but at the same time I don't think I've ever been truly emotionally satisfied by one of his works. Even A Boy's Own Story left me out in the cold in a way that I never really got from other books of that type from his contemporaries, like Felice Picano for instance.
Part of me thinks that it has something to do with the fact that he might just be a better biographer than he is a fiction writer -- when I realised that his novels are written like biographies of fictional characters, the whole thing started to click for me. His subject here is Guy, a beautiful and intrepid French model who is snapped up from a grim industrial town in the 70s and made the toast of the jet-set New York fashion scene of the 80s before he (or the reader) knows it. Extend this to about 300 pages, and you pretty much have the book's entire plot.
Honestly, what helped in reading this book was the knowledge that it more or less plays out like a modern picaresque novel -- Guy is the naive but carefree protagonist who we follow through a bizarre and decadent society, beset on all sides by the grotesque and the carnivalesque. It also helped to think of the book as a satire, and it does have some truly funny moments (a scene involving some misguided BDSM and coprophagia might truly be one of the funniest I've read all year) but at the same time has some very grim and off-putting epsiodes too (a supporting character being given AIDs through no fault of his own gave me pause, and forced me to take a break for a while before I was ready to pick the book back up again -- what chilled me wasn't his disease, but how callously and hollowly the other characters reacted to it).
So, in all, I'm conflicted. I can't even say that I enjoyed Our Young Man in the traditional sense. Maybe that was White's intention. Maybe he's trying to write beyond simple "enjoyment". If that is indeed the case, maybe I can safely go on and look past the rest of his books.
Part of me thinks that it has something to do with the fact that he might just be a better biographer than he is a fiction writer -- when I realised that his novels are written like biographies of fictional characters, the whole thing started to click for me. His subject here is Guy, a beautiful and intrepid French model who is snapped up from a grim industrial town in the 70s and made the toast of the jet-set New York fashion scene of the 80s before he (or the reader) knows it. Extend this to about 300 pages, and you pretty much have the book's entire plot.
Honestly, what helped in reading this book was the knowledge that it more or less plays out like a modern picaresque novel -- Guy is the naive but carefree protagonist who we follow through a bizarre and decadent society, beset on all sides by the grotesque and the carnivalesque. It also helped to think of the book as a satire, and it does have some truly funny moments (a scene involving some misguided BDSM and coprophagia might truly be one of the funniest I've read all year) but at the same time has some very grim and off-putting epsiodes too (a supporting character being given AIDs through no fault of his own gave me pause, and forced me to take a break for a while before I was ready to pick the book back up again -- what chilled me wasn't his disease, but how callously and hollowly the other characters reacted to it).
So, in all, I'm conflicted. I can't even say that I enjoyed Our Young Man in the traditional sense. Maybe that was White's intention. Maybe he's trying to write beyond simple "enjoyment". If that is indeed the case, maybe I can safely go on and look past the rest of his books.