In which The Gay Recluse looks back at a classic of post-war American fiction written in a gay voice.

As we read A Boy’s Own Story, we are repeatedly struck by the bleak and joyless sense of oppression that seeps out from almost every page of Edmund White’s treatment of a boy growing up somewhere in the 1950s American Midwest. Everyone is the worst kind of freak, the kind who tries to hide antisocial or obsessive behavior under a veneer of suburban convention, so that being gay ought to (but of course isn’t) the least problematic of conditions; the father is a large, morose man who sleeps all day and gets up each afternoon at five before donning a suit and spending the night at work in his basement office; the mother, after a divorce, is a drunk who moves into a hotel where she hopelessly chases after (the worst kind of) men; an effeminate boarding school teacher who offers a glimmer of hope turns out to be oddly religious and pushes the boy into a twisted relationship with his dour wife; a psychiatrist is an egomaniacal drug addict. None of this comes off as the least bit campy or amusing, but rather evokes a poverty of strength and character in the overall terrain of the book that is truly dispiriting; there’s really nobody here whom the boy (or by extension, the reader) can admire, and to this extent, we are moved by his plight.

Yet despite this identification, there is something offputting about White’s narrative that has nothing to do with the setting, which is an overriding sense that we don’t entirely trust the narrator; for example, we are told early on that the boy is a “sissy” (a word, incidentally, along with “leader of the crowd” and “going steady,” that seems to belong to an entire generation in the United States to which we — thankfully — do not belong) which is believable enough as we learn how unpopular he was in school, prone to talking in a falsetto and waving his arms around like the hysterical (and stereotypical) little queen. But then just a few pages later we find this same sissy somehow befriending the most popular (and athletic, captain of the tennis team) boy in the school, with whom he “sat around for hours in (their) underpants and talked about Sartre and tennis and Sally and all the other kids at school and love and God and the afterlife and infinity.” They discuss friendship and homosexuality. In short — and maybe because we, too, grew up in a Midwestern suburban wasteland (in fact, we attended the same boarding school as White) — we weren’t buying it; these are borders that just aren’t crossed, or at least not without a more compelling (or conscious) explanation than White offers.

While White’s description of the surrounding landscape seems completely believable (if extreme), the adventures of his lead character come off as exaggerated without — and here’s the real problem — any clear purpose. Is White subversively deconstructing the stereotype of a prissy little bookworm? If so, why not just let the character’s actions speak for themselves instead of lapsing into one hackneyed characteristic after the next (White literally provides a list of “sissy” traits and says they all apply)? Intentional or not, the language in these scenes are what most severely dates the book (though it is only 25 years old).

We suspect that despite his intention to write an autobiographical treatment of his youth, White wanted to impress readers with his precocious nature, in both the psychological and sexual terms that obviously matter to him the most; unfortunately, the fiction does not seem to mesh well with the fact. Which is too bad, because White is a prose technician whose ability to effortlessly shift tense and toss off fifty-cent words is breathtaking at times. (We underlined “plenum,” “seraphic,” “lentor,” “frangible,” and “saurian” among others).

We get the sense that the adult White was not sufficiently “distanced” from the teenage version, and so the book suffers from a split personality, as if White himself were (or had been) trying to make us — and perhaps himself — believe he was more “impressive” than he really was. Though Edmund White will always be a cultural hero to us, with this book — generally his most acclaimed — we are left questioning his literary legacy; as we consider his considerable skills, we are left wishing that he would have simply resigned himself to the harsh truths from which he had obviously arisen.

For a review of Hotel de Dream, Edmund White’s most recent (2007) novel, click here.