Came across this in a used bookstore and immediately picked it up despite it being the second in a trilogy (the first is the more-famous A Boy's Own Story) because I've been immensely charmed by the Edmund White I became acquainted with in a number of interviews as well as some essays he wrote for the NYRB: charming, chatty, erudite, and literate; American friendliness combined with French aestheticism. Catnip for the NYRB-reading type!
This same humane, sensuous sensibility presides over this book, which covers a young gay man's life from high school through (I think) his late twenties, across the fifties and sixties, and is loosely autobiographical. On the level of plot, you could say most of the novel is about the narrator proceeding through a lot of seedy situations (gloryhole blowjobs and the like) and a succession of sometimes-good, sometimes-bad sex partners, but this summary seems to suggest a much more depressing and "gritty" book than this one.
Partly this is because White is refreshingly shame-free and democratic, so that all the perverts, "inverts," sissies, fetishists, and low-class trash that appear in this novel are lovingly caressed by the writing and held up to the light like pieces of glass art. Plus, White is an acolyte of beautiful writing in the Nabokov style, so the pages are studded with beautiful descriptions: not only a city at dawn "slowly constructing itself like coral under incoming tides of light," but a comparison of a man's scrotum to a delicately veined leaf that I think would have made the Nabokov who called a phallus "the sceptre of my passion" proud. In fact, White was apparently one of the few contemporary writers Nabokov praised, if you need any more reason to read him.
