Jack Holmes and His Friend by Edmund White

White is sometimes said to have a narrow range-see, for example, the peevish review of Jack Holmes by Philip Hensher in the London Daily Telegraph (23 January 2012)-and it’s true that six of his novels and both his memoirs cover overlapping territory, including recurrent events and characters. Of course, any writer’s voice is his stock in trade, but White’s is defined more than most by its personal inclinations, self-revealing in a manner that might seem compulsive if it were not so self-conscious, emotionally idiosyncratic yet convivial enough to be taken to typify an emergent social type. The same voice animates White’s full-fledged autobiographies, My Lives (2005) and City Boy (2009), while a modified, more straightforward variant infuses his voluminous nonfiction, including his magisterial 1993 biography of Jean Genet and more modest but still wholly creditable lives of Proust (2002) and Rimbaud (2008). Perhaps more than any others, these books gave voice to gay male experience in the first wave of post-Stonewall writing. This would be a bold move for any writer, but it’s especially audacious for White, who became probably the best-known gay writer in America on the strength of a trilogy of three semi-autobiographical novels- A Boy’s Own Story (1982), The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988), and The Farewell Symphony (1997)-dependent on a lushly textured first-person voice, stylized yet candid and companionable. From that point, as confidants of Jack’s “friend,” we see both characters anew-Jack, whom we’ve already come to know well from Will’s perspective, and Will, formerly viewed from afar, now from the vantage of his own bluff, engaging, straight-from-the-shoulder point of view. Will is the novel’s other title character, and when he takes over and begins to tell the story in his own direct, lucid voice, the book moves to new levels of intimacy, with a sharply prismatic effect. From a close distance-distinct from Jack’s consciousness but limited to his point of view-we follow Jack’s gradual awakening as a gay man, his desultory career working at a magazine of the arts, and his growing attraction to his coworker, the devoutly heterosexual Will.

Until then, an attentive yet breezy third-person narrator recounts the life of the title character from boarding school and college in the Midwest of the 1950s through his move to New York City in the 1960s.

Halfway through Jack Holmes and His Friend, Edmund White’s delicate and expansive tenth novel, the book’s perspective shifts dramatically, though with little fanfare.

Jack Holmes and His Friend by Edmund White