Our Young Man

by Edmund White

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 wrote for Vogue for ten years) explores the power of physical beauty--to fascinate, to enslave, and to deceive--with sparkling wit and pathos.

Genres: Fiction, LGBT, Gay, Queer, Historical Fiction, Gay Fiction, Contemporary

282 pages, Hardcover

First published April 5, 2016

About the author

Edmund Valentine White III was an American novelist, memoirist, playwright, biographer, and essayist. He was the recipient of Lambda Literary's Visionary Award, the National Book Foundation's Lifetime Achievement Award, and the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction. France made him Chevalier (and later Officier) de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1993.
White was known as a groundbreaking writer of gay literature and a major influence on gay American literature and has been called "the first major queer novelist to champion a new generation of writers."

Reviews

[Sean · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's bad. Really bad. I was embarrassed for the author.
The characters are thinly drawn and their actions are not credible. Most of the novel revolves around the narcissistic protagonist and the author does nothing to show us why we should be interested in him. The plot is virtually non-existent. The AIDS crisis, in its heyday, is shown merely as a mere annoyance to the characters in the novel. What happened to the Edmund White who wrote the Farewell Symphony?
This manuscript would never have become a novel published by a major publishing house if it had not been written by such a well established author.
I stuck with the novel because I was certain that in the end there would be some sort of payoff for the reader. There wasn't.
Don't waste your money.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Our Young Man is surprisingly different from White's other works. It's strangely detached, written in a cold, transparent style. There is little to no connection created between the reader and its characters, which are of types few of us would identify with, although we easily recognize them from other works in this genre of literary gay fiction.

All of the characters in Our Young Man are stereotypes created to poke ironic fun at. This is a respectable way to write a novel, but it's deliberately unoriginal in this instance, and it comes across as superficial, not edifying. I kept expecting White, hopefully having set all this up for some high purpose, to break out and reveal something new, perhaps a deep insight into gay life provided by his long life experience and successful career--but it never happens. The abrupt ending is unsurprising, and does not leave us with any more wisdom than we had going into the book.

The book's humor, sometimes forced especially in the nearly sociological comparisons between French and American culture, is one of its more enjoyable aspects. So is the sex, presented matter-of-factly, but even this will seem too clinical for some readers.

So why did White write this book? Drawing some obvious thematic allusions to The Picture of Dorian Gray, he acknowledges that we wish to be beautiful and desirable in our old age, we yearn to own a cute, young, trophy boy, we want be kept by a rich European baron, we lust after rough, tattooed thugs: these are the book's core character motivations. The problem is, of course, that these mostly are unrealizable fantasies, even if there is some weird magical portrait up in the attic.

Given that, and accepting White's eminence as a consummate literary author, it seems inescapable that he has written an intentionally ironic "cheap" male romance novel, one that would honestly be unexceptional if sold as such, in spite of being supplied with a new cover, predictably emblazoned with a ripped, yet not to be found within, male model. To this point, Our Young Man can be read as a satire of exactly those novels. It goes without saying that readers who want a more, shall we say, visceral, yet no more real, example of gay male fantasy writing should look to that male romance sub-genre innumerably populated by other authors.

Two or three stars? It deserves no more than two compared to his other novels. But since he has successfully resisted today's trend toward long, weepy, hyper-emotional novels and throwaway romances, producing instead a gentle satire of these, I'll give it three.

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

Our Young Man is at once a delicious gossipy breeze of a novel, a sort of luxe beach read, and a deeply surreal story that seems almost experimental in form. It follows a beautiful, eternally youthful Frenchman, Guy, from his poor rural childhood through a lengthy and successful modelling career and a series of love affairs.

While Guy's ageless visage is never implied to have a supernatural cause, the sheer extent of his ability to remain physically young seems miraculous enough to give the story an uncanny slant, deliberately invoking The Picture of Dorian Gray. And he is a thoroughly elusive character, often seeming more robotic or mechanical than human. 'He felt the power of his looks, but it seemed a very limited power and he couldn't yet calculate its dimensions.' 'Guy wanted to ask her if she was relieved but he didn't know if that was what human beings asked.'

The third-person subjective narration concentrates mostly on Guy, but it occasionally slips away from him and alights on other characters, invariably men who're obsessed with him. Sometimes this happens mid-chapter or even mid-paragraph. Sometimes Guy leaves the picture entirely, only to reappear as suddenly as he left. A chapter might span hours or years. Crucial events are encapsulated in a couple of light sentences, such as the first time anyone of Guy's acquaintance dies as a result of AIDS: 'A new illness... broke out and wiped out a whole house of five on Fire Island. Guy decided not to renew his share... It was safer to go to the Hamptons.' The edge of flippancy here illustrates how dangerously dismissive attitudes towards the disease were the early days of awareness, but it's also typical of the way the narrative skims over the larger themes shaping the characters' lives and repeatedly settles on the superficial minutiae. Speaking of which, I couldn't help but enjoy the very knowing asides about fashion: 'Karl [Lagerfeld] himself I thought was carrying a purse, but, my dear, it was a book! Les Liaisons Dangereuses, in a first edition. Oh, so chic, reading at a disco! And of course he had his fan and monocle and his hair in a ponytail, but he should lose weight.'

The book ends so oddly, though I liked it. Guy suddenly vanishes, leaving America and the narrative at the same time, saying a brisk and brusque goodbye in a letter. Does this make the recipient of the letter – his young lover Kevin – a stand-in for the reader? The perspective has again shifted, this time to Kevin, and we along with Kevin read Guy's final note and feel the gut-punch of its impact all the way to the killer closing line.

As I wrote elsewhere, if I was forced to sum up Our Young Man I'd call it a sombre romp. 'Something about being beautiful induced melancholy in Guy', White writes early on, and the whole of Guy's story embodies that brew of beauty and melancholy, sexiness and sadness.

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[Gerasimos Reads · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was my first Edmund White novel and I absolutely loved it. It reads like a luxurious beach read, in the sense that you can't put it down and it's lighter literary fiction, but it has a level of sophistication and depth. I loved the characters and White's sweeping view of 1980's New York. It's a very enjoyable read and I can see why White is a master of queer fiction. He writes with confidence and intelligence.

[Gerhard · Rating 5 out of 5]

It takes a brave writer to stage a comedy setpiece in the St Vincent AIDS ward in New York in the 1980s. There are certain things that comedy seems barred from tackling: 9/11, the Holocaust, Nelson Mandela and Apartheid, HIV/AIDS. But Edmund White knows instinctively that absurdity is the flipside of tragedy, and to highlight the former accentuates the latter.

I do not think I have ever enjoyed a gay novel as much as I did White’s latest. Who would have thought that White could pull off a screwball (gay) comedy, and skewer so many sacred (gay) cows in the process? After all, this is the highly-lauded writer who gave us the sturm-und-drang of The Farewell Symphony.

That used to be my favourite gay novel ever. Until Our Young Man, that is. I honestly think that White has written a Faggots for our politically-overcorrect, over-capitalised, media-saturated, surface- and image-obsessed zeitgeist.

This cautionary tale of a French fashion model who miraculously never seems to age, and who twists himself into such knots of lying and misdirection to justify his life to all the people he is involved with, is written with such sass, baudiness, humour, pathos, raunchiness, crudity and insight that the reader cannot help but fall in love.

White, himself no spring chicken, clearly writes with great experience (and feeling) about the gay community’s ongoing obsession with hedonism and youth, and the awful toll this exacts on love and life. Magnificent. I defy any reader to get past White’s devastating ending without a tear in the eye. And a smile, for all the young men we have loved and known and lost.

[George Ilsley · Rating 4 out of 5]

White's writing style is strange now; almost flat, deceptively so. I liked the way this novel evolved. "Our young man" is not really the French model, Guy, but increasingly is Andres, Kevin, Kevin's brother, Andres' nephew and so on.

"Our young man" in that sense conveys a layered and nurturing mentorship (and this aspect is in contrast with some elements of Guy's relationship's with older men, which were transactional at times).

However, as I write this I realize that it was all more complicated than my superficial comments. That is the strength here, that more is always going on, and appearances can deceive. A still surface can conceal hidden depths.

I would read this again.

[Nicolas Chinardet · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although the book is a pleasant enough read it is also terribly written and full of careless inaccuracies in style, plot and structure (something particularly unacceptable from an author of the supposed stature of Mr White, who acknowledges the involvement of no less that FOUR editors on this project!). The characters are not only paper thin and unrealistic, they also change appearance and personality as the plot goes on. The whole thing feels like a pot-boiler quickly and sloppily assembled for no obvious reason.

p50: "He opened a white paper bag and pulled out a croissant, found a plate in the cupboard, and ate it."

[Lucy Somerhalder · Rating 4 out of 5]

It got a bit real, a bit harrowing for a while, but it pulled through and the second half was downright hilarious.

[Dan]

Originally appeared at Lambda Literary

Edmund White’s work has long been interested in the allure of facades. In The Married Man, he showcased what grand heights a love affair can reach when rooted in illusion and misdirection. Likewise, his memoir City Boy: My Life in New York in the 1960’s and 70’s enchants the reader with a selective recollection of mid-century glamour, both of the down-at-the-heels and champagne varieties. Set predominantly in the 1980’s and ‘90’s against the backdrop of AIDS, his latest novel, Our Young Man, interrogates the crucible of vanity prevalent in modern gay life. The novel follows Guy, a model who never seems to age. His endless beauty is a kind of curse for, unlike that more famous ageless beauty, Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, there is nothing supernatural going on here. Guy’s looks are not without their slavish upkeep:

He thought he was like an expensive racehorse whom all the people around him kept inspecting and trotting not for his well-being but to protect their investment. Feel his withers […] is he off his feed? […] the grandstand seems to spook him, he needs blinders […] his nose is warm. If he went out without sunglasses, Pierre-Georges[, his agent,] came running after him to warn him against squint lines. If he gained an ounce, Pierre-Georges would pinch his waist and murmur, “Miss Piggy.” If he wore tight jeans, Pierre-Georges would hiss, “you look like a whore,” and make him change to something looser. Once, when he wore a filmy, sheer robe, Pierre-Georges whispered that most dismissive of French phrases, “Trés original.” If he concentrated while doing a crossword, Pierre-George warned him he was getting elevenses—those vertical worry lines above his nose.

Still, his looks make him a wealthy man, both by dint of his profession in an era that venerated the supermodel and by attracting a string of well-heeled suitors who seem to want nothing more than to lavish their riches upon a great beauty. For Guy, the principal advantage of his beauty is that it allows him to escape “[the] big, dead, dreary industrial city in the heart of France” where he was raised. Modelling permits him to build a fashionable life for himself first in Paris then in New York while the relative anonymity of print and runway work means he can ply his trade for as long as his beauty lasts, even as the calendar increasingly shows the improbability of his continued career. “He had suffered . . . in his twenties from insecurities (how long could this career of his go on?), and in his thirties from disillusionment (how long must this career of his go on?).” Guy’s existential angst hints at a subtle critique of the schizophrenic nature of vanity. As the novel progresses that critique resolves into an urgent cost-benefit analysis.

Our Young Man is obsessed with manufacturing and maintaining illusions. Guy’s beauty has already made him wealthy and his various liaisons have netted him a Mercedes, a West Village townhouse, and a summer home in the Fire Island Pines, yet as his beauty fades, he goes to great lengths to extend “his shelf life”—he forgoes the tofu in his miso soup and lives “on a diet of espressos and cocaine” to satisfy the heroin chic looks his clients migrate to in the mid-’90’s. Given his success, such vanity can hardly be explained away as merely the burden of a racehorse making good for investors. A charitable interpretation may attribute Guy’s devotion to beauty as the particular flavor that workaholism might take in modeling’s upper echelons; and while it’s true Guy enjoys his profession, even to the point of disdaining newcomers that fail to meet his lofty standards, he hardly comes across as a man devoted to his craft simply out of love for the work. His desire for beauty is an ends unto itself and beauty imprisons Guy as it liberates him. As he ages and it becomes more laborious maintaining the illusion of youth, Guy’s vanity exacts an ever higher price.

Guy is not a model who looks great for his age, he is a counterfeit youth. At one point, he tells his new lover that he’s twenty-five when he’s nearly forty. He’s hardly the only one passing himself off as something he’s not. In fact, Guy seems to associate almost exclusively with counterfeiters. Fred, one of Guy’s patrons, comes out late in life and dedicates himself to being an “A-list gay.” He dyes his plugged hair, gets a tummy tuck and a facelift. He finally achieves his goal when AIDS blinds him and he allows himself to believe Guy’s bald faced flatteries. Guy’s first lover, Andrés, an impecunious art student, resorts to forging Salvador Dalí painting to keep up with Guy’s monied lifestyle. When finally caught wetting his bristle, as it were, Andrés downplays the transgression by stridently claiming, “‘I only worked on lithos of [Dalí’s] best work.’” Guy hardly needs convincing. “A copy of a fake by a fraud was surely a negligible sort of offense” as far as he’s concerned, hardly a surprising stance for one shaving fifteen years off his age. Andrés is convicted and sent to jail. With his lover behind bars, Guy’s desire quickly descends upon Kevin, the gay half of a pair of 19-year-old Midwestern twins “with lips like Froot Loops and . . . teeth like Chiclets.” Kevin is a virgin (“Except [for] fooling around with [his] brother those two times.”) when Guy meets him, but Guy is quick to mentor the teen. By the logic of the novel, Kevin’s “small dick and youth” makes him a natural bottom, but Guy allows him to top as a way of “build[ing] up his confidence.” In this way, Guy and Kevin conspire to counterfeit the natural order of the coupling.

Kevin is an interesting counterbalance to the novel’s obsession with vanity, however. “He [is] enough of a good Midwestern Lutheran to despise worldliness, especially in its most restless, nagging form: vanity.” But that doesn’t mean he is immune to the sway of vanity. While he would rather “be focused on serious, ultimate philosophical questions,” Kevin struggles with the siren song of youth and beauty and his limited window of opportunity to fully leverage the two for pleasure and personal gain. We see this most directly in his relationship with Guy. Kevin has long desired Guy, and his beauty has afforded him access to his love/lust object. As much as Kevin may look down upon Guy’s “frippery,” talking with him makes Kevin feel “more alert, more refined, more alive intellectually.” That refinement is itself an embodiment of Guy’s vanity. Elsewhere in the novel, Guy admits as much, chalking up his cosmopolitanism to a series of social tricks picked up over the course of his long career—in short, another illusion. Kevin can justify vanity if it means he can have Guy, but the spectre of Andrés’ looming release from prison threatens the relationships longevity. Guy feels a sense of duty to the man who spent seven years in prison as collateral damage for his successful career. When Andrés discovers Guy and Kevin in bed together, he begins to question the sagacity of his sacrifice. (It’s not the only time White allows the fallout of his characters’ decisions to haunt the page.) The novel’s conclusion hangs on who Guy will ultimately choose: the counterfeit top with the “million-dollar ass” or the convicted forger made “strong and muscular” in prison. Viewed from the perspective of vanity, the choice is more a question of degrees than absolutes.

The world of Our Young Man will doubtless feel familiar to longtime readers and draw comparisons to the author’s best known works. Yet it would be a mistake to dismiss this novel as simply a rehash of old themes. With sumptuous prose and continental style, White shows that he’s capable of returning to an old well and finding something new to plumb. Guy’s resilient youth may be singular, but his ambivalent subjugation to vanity holds universal sway. Beauty confers great pleasure. So, too, does it extract a hefty cost.

If you liked this, make sure to follow me on Goodreads for more reviews!

[Bill · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is impossible not to consider Dorian Gray when considering this novel, about a male French super-model named Guy whose beauty lasts beyond his time (or shelf life as White puts it). The story of Guy from his discovery on the street in Paris at 17 until the denouement which I'll leave unstated, is told with humor, pathos, and even the seemingly ridiculous. It concerns his self-abasement to advance his career, his generosity as he earns or is given money, his need for real love and the superficiality and frank craziness of the fashion world. Guy is complex enough to remain interesting in spite of his life purpose being due to his looks and photogenicity.

At my time of life this book hit me a bit differently. I could identify more with the older men who advanced his career and wondered if I would use Guy as they did if I had the money and possessions to conquer him. To his agent, "“You just sold my immortal soul for a car and a parking lot without consulting me?”—sex for favors, but he did it for career. Still Guy is a survivor and maintains his self and his health through the 80's AIDs years as he gradually becomes the seducer. The circle turns.

7 of 10 stars

[Kim · Rating 1 out of 5]

Our Young Man should have been titled WTF but I, like an idiot, kept reading it until I finished when I should have given up early on. Was this Edmund White channeling Bret Easton Ellis? (If so, it's an insult to Ellis.) I just couldn't figure out what this novel was supposed to be about. It just droned on and on for more than 200 pages with insults against blacks (there are many to choose from here), women, Americans, Italians, older people, the physically unfit, people from the Midwest, and pretty much anyone who isn't a young, attractive, HIV-negative white man. I was going to give this one two stars just because I read White wrote this book after he'd suffered a heart attack so I was willing to cut him some little slack because I figured he had a lot of issues (physical and mental) going on at the time. But Our Young Man just failed on so many levels that I couldn't bring myself to go with the "it was okay" rating because it wasn't okay! Guy was ridiculous, Fred was sad and pathetic, Kevin was clueless, Andres was an idiot, and Pierre-Georges should have been run over by a bus. This wasn't my first Edmund White book, but it will certainly be my last. Moving on...

[Miguel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Our Young Man conta a história de um modelo francês, que vive em Nova Iorque, e que vinga no exigente mercado da moda, durante os anos 70 e 80, evoluindo a narrativa ao longo dos seus quatro ou cinco amantes/namorados. O livro é, por um lado, um exercício sobre o poder da beleza física e da juventude, mas serve ao autor, de igual forma, como exercício sobre os modos de vida gay na época em que aparece a epidemia da sida.

De certo modo, é inevitável perguntarmo-nos se o Edmund White precisava de escrever mais este livro, se ele vem trazer alguma coisa de novo ao universo narrativo do autor. Mas, por outro lado, o prazer da escrita de White mantém-se incólume, a elegância do toque, o sentido de humor de uma ironia tão irresistível quanto perigosa, o confronto com as matérias mais íntimas, o gosto pelo mundano e pelo gossip que, no autor, convive na mesma frase com a erudição e a atenção obsessiva à natureza humana.

E postas as coisas assim, mesmo sem se revelarem experiências de descoberta e inovação, continuarei a ler os romances de Edmund White, enquanto ele tiver paciência e fulgor para os ir escrevendo.

[Sian Lile-Pastore · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a novel about a gay french man in the 1980s working as a model in New York.... That should be enough to make anyone read it!
I liked it, i enjoyed White's writing style, but ultimately was a bit underwhelmed by it all.
Found the whole thing a little surfacy ( I know it's modelling) and while there was lots I did enjoy, it just didn't really click for me. Reckon Edmund White had fun writing it!

[Christopher Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

I very much prefer Edmund White’s non-fiction :))))))♥️♥️♥️

[Raimondo Lagioia · Rating 3 out of 5]

For a book that started with such promise, this ended up being a disappointment. Of course, White's prose is still as divine as ever. There was never any doubt there.

But how I wish that Guy took the fullest advantage of his looks, wielding it like the powerful weapon that it could have been. For such a "historic" beauty to only finagle two (admittedly choice) properties from his besotted daddies is laughably weak, especially since he was able to extend his modeling career to around two decades. White did try to drum him up as an homme fatal of sorts, but sadly that fell flat on its face.

Also: what an empty, depressing ending. Guy has always been contemptuous of backwaters, European or otherwise, since he spent his miserable childhood in one. It just seems so unimaginable that he would live out the rest of his days in an environment he actively loathes, even if it's for someone he loves.

In any case, his considerable wealth is still intact. A tender blossom like him can only take so much tawdriness before he flings himself aboard a Concord, heading to Mykonos or Gstaad to soothe his offended sensibilities. I'm giving him a week, tops.

6.5/10; 3 stars.

[Trevor · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just the right amount of raunchy and ridiculous. White's ability to transport you into 80's gay NY is so impressive. A gay satire that pokes fun at homosexual idiosyncrasies, what more could you want!

[Walford]

From the first sentence (full disclosure: I didn't get past p. 1) this reads like White wasn't even trying. Like the assembly-line writing of the most prolific genre novelists.

[Nicholas George · Rating 3 out of 5]

What to make of Guy, the protagonist of this eminently readable yet ultimately puzzling novel? He's an Adonis-beautiful fashion model who somehow has discovered eternal youth, looking like he's 22 as he approaches his 40th birthday. He's smart, savvy and fully aware that his looks (and income) will someday disappear, yet he makes little effort to plan for the future, other than acquiring, almost accidentally, some property. It is only through a dramatic, final gesture that he seems to take control of his destiny, rather than continue to be--as he himself puts it--'a black hole in space that shapes the outcome of events but doesn't really exist'. Guy's two lovers are equally frustrating. There's the Colombian Andres, who spends most of the book in prison due to art fraud, and wholesome, midwestern Kevin, both of whom benefit from Guy's love (and support) but constantly waver in being deserving of it. (In fact, at times I wondered if it is Kevin who is the 'young man' of the book's title, as he is the one who probably has the more interesting story trajectory.) Even as I struggled to make sense of these characters as real people, I couldn't help but admire White's masterful writing. He even makes the frequent, explicit sex seem not at all erotic yet not distasteful or overly clinical. Much of the book takes place during the depth of the AIDS crisis, yet there's little self-pity or 'Angels in America'-type deification in describing its victims. I actually ended up liking and almost admiring the novel's three main characters, which is something I certainly didn't expect.

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

White manages once again to deliver a compelling page-turner of a story, filled with utterly absorbing characters and incidents that ring very very true, all the while producing some of the most exquisite prose one can find in a novel. We are brought into the story of Guy, an exceptionally beautiful young man who escapes the ugly town of his impoverished background to the life of a super model. Under the guidance of a cynical but effective older man, he makes his way to New York, just in time for the AIDS crisis. His extraordinary beauty, fame and allure attract all manner of suitors, including a grotesque Belgian minor noble with a taste for masochism and the director of blaxploitation films who comes out late in life. White possesses extraordinary powers of psychology and setting -- as the relationships evolve, we see the entire range of "A-list gay" life in Manhattan and Fire Island, much of it amusing and tragic at the same time. Guy never seems to age and continues to work well past his sell-by date in his competitive profession, a kind of Dorian Gray stunt. Eventually, he falls heavily for two younger men, a Columbian grad student and devotee of Salvador Dali, and the gay half of a pair of identical twins from the Midwest, even younger, who wants to be a foreign service officer. The tangled interconnections between these love interests gets pretty steamy -- spoiler alert, there is a LOT of sex depicted -- but more than anything, providing a window to the human heart, cut up by ego and bruised by life, that I suspect will stay with me for quite a while.

[Liam Beerends · Rating 1 out of 5]

I wish I could erase this whole book from my memory.
Looking for the plot seems like one of those impossible puzzels, the plot is non-existent. The only thing the main character (whose name I've already forgotten) seems to do is tell people how great he is. His personality is hard to describe (if he even has a personality), the only thing he does is put other people down for his own enjoyment and pleasure. The other characters aren't any better. There is not one likable character in this whole book. The amount of sex scenes in this book is absurd, and don't even get me started on the amount of insults. The amount of racism in this book is trough the roof. It seems like they went out of their way to make anything racist, even if the situation had nothing to do with race. There are so many groups of people negative targeted in this book i can't even count them all. Black people are talked down upon, women are portrait as useless objects, people who aren't overly skinny are shown as filthy almost animal like people, and these are just a few examples. If that isn't enough for you to hate the book, the writing style will tip you over the edge. There are the long paragraphs of nothing. Boring information that brings nothing to the story at all. The dialog isn't any better, just plain meaningless words.
This book is not worth your money, or your time.

[Joshua Greer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really quite enjoyed this book. This was my first experience with Edmund White and I was quite impressed. The book has a nice flow with peaks in all the right places. There are moments of joy, and heartbreak. One of my favorite quotes comes from about half way through the book. The discussion is of the President of the US at the time (Reagan) and the AIDS crisis. ---
"Only you remember that," Pierre-George said sourly. "yes, I'm sad. Crushed. I hate this country, with its puritanism and heartlessness and filthy diseases." "And that's all Reagan's fault, I suppose?" "Whose?" Guy asked, genuinely not recognizing the name. "Flute!" Pierre-George lisped. It amused him to sound like a flustered French matron and to use out-of-date genteel swear words. "You honestly don't know who the president of the United States is?" "Oh. Her!"

The book does have some language and is very descriptive of sexual encounters, but not in a distasteful way. I'm definitely planning to add his other books to my TBR.

[Sophy H · Rating 1 out of 5]

You know those really really trashy chick lit novels? Yeah, this is that, but in gay!

Edmund, mate, what were you thinking?! This is the most vapid, air-headed, flighty bollocks I have read in gay fiction in a good while!

The protagonist is an unfeeling, robotic arsehole, the subsidiary characters are weakly written and all seem to follow a caricature. An old man who likes nothing more than being pissed on by a circle of younger men (and a questionable scatting scene)! A young hungry man totes in love. No, just no Edmund!

This was poor writing through and through, dare I say it felt lazy. If Barbara Cartland identified as a gay man, this is the shit she would write!

1 whole time-wasting, lost hours of my life star!

[Andrew Smith · Rating 2 out of 5]

I rated this two stars — the first because I grudgingly admit that Edmund White does display admirable writing talents. The second star is to give White the benefit of the doubt that he meant this vapid, one-dimensional litany of boring characters and mind-numbing action to be comic or farcical, which it very occasionally succeeds in being. But on the whole the book is as tedious and superficial as the characters it portrays, although — or maybe because — the lives are of a glamorous gay NYC model and his partners. Admittedly a few of the abundant sex scenes are successfully prurient, but most are more likely to qualify for the Literary Review's annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award.

[Thom · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not the best I've read by this author, story is quite shallow, characters never really come to life and to be honest I found the main character rather unappealing. Overall too much emphasis on the external (it's all about good-looking men and models) and not enough insight in the internal life of the people in this story, which makes it a bit dull.

[David Quick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Someone give me a context for thinking about this book. I enjoyed his prose and went right along with him, but what was he going for?

And Mr. White, if you're reading, the university is Columbia. The country is Colombia.

[Monical · Rating 2 out of 5]

I find White's books vapid, and this one is no exception. None of his characters even reach emotional depth. I should give up on reading his books, but I keep hoping that the next one will be better!

[Rambling Reader · Rating 4 out of 5]

oh eddie, what a sly, mischievous, charming, affectionate parody. 4.75, nearly perfect

[Peter Goers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most enjoyable. Fascinating. Beautifully turned. But....like many a Sondheim song it doesn't finish it just stops. It left me wanting more.

[Randall · Rating 1 out of 5]

I usually like Edmund White - his memoirs in Paris - Flaneur were just wonderful. But this book did not do it for me.

[Daanish Shabbir · Rating 3 out of 5]

some dramatic ass shit to have been read in bender rm