White's new novel is like a bi-curious When Harry Met Sally.
As with many bookish gay men of a certain age, my first contact with “gay fiction” was Edmund White’s autobiographical bildungsroman A Boy’s Own Story (1982). Parts of it are now downright cringe-making – as adolescent solipsism tends to be, however exquisitely written – but it’s easy to look on first love with a forgiving eye. Forty years on, Jack Holmes and His Friend – like a bi-curious When Harry Met Sally – asks whether gay men and straight men can ever be just friends.
Anyone who’s read White’s memoirs City Boy (2009) and My Lives (2006) should find little surprising in the story of Jack Holmes, who, in the first (and better) half of this book, treads a well-worn, if perfectly manicured, path from a Midwestern prep school in the late 50s to the intersections of Greenwich Village, Publisher’s Row and the underground gay world in New York over the next decade. As Jack eases out of the closet, he meets Will Wright: a similarly handsome, articulate but reserved aspiring writer at the second-rate magazine with first-rate pretensions where they work.
The only flaw in this fine bromance is that Will is as hopelessly devoted to the “articulated floral wetness” of heterosexuality as Jack is to him. Jack is more enchanted by penises, “like one of those mad medieval Japanese heroines in the movies with their pale faces drowned in hair pushed forward”. It takes all sorts, I suppose, and no sort escapes White’s gimlet eye. The sex (there’s a lot of it) is sometimes more worthy of the Bad Sex Prize than a Pulitzer, but Jack is most agreeable company.
The same, unfortunately, can’t be said for Will, who narrates the next section, set in the mid-70s. After a long estrangement, the friends renew their friendship. But as Will shifts from object of unrequited desire to subject, he ironically becomes a less vivid, well-observed character. In literature, adultery, self-pity and pubic lice are not mortal sins. Being boring about it all is.
It’s with relief a dose of clap picked up at an orgy – and the first report of a mysterious immune disease affecting gay men – sends Will back to his family. White, opines Dave Eggers, is a “virtuosic writer of sentences”, but sentences alone no more make a good novel than a 24-carat gold filigree setting turns a lump of glass into a diamond. Jack Holmes and His Friend isn’t totally worthless but, like all costume jewellery, is an acquired taste.
JACK HOLMES AND HIS FRIEND, by Edmund White (Bloomsbury, $36.99).
Craig Ranapia writes culture blog Muse at Public Address.