FICTION:BRIAN LYNCHreviews Jack Holmes and His FriendBy Edmund White Bloomsbury, 390pp. £18.99
THIS IS A NOVEL about three failures. Two of them are the central characters in the book. The third is their creator, Edmund White. But taken together they amount to a success, of sorts.
Jack Holmes, the hero, starts out in the 1960s as a student of Chinese art history in the American Midwest (like White himself) and ends up writing about business for Newsweekand squiring rich old ladies around New York. His main failure, though, is that he loves another man and can't have him. This unwinnable friend, as well as being heterosexual, is a failed novelist. His name is a childish pun: Will Wright will not write because he's too busy concocting glossy, semifictional annual reports for failing companies and being unfaithful to his anorexic but wealthy wife – they live on a 20-acre estate half an hour from Manhattan.
Holmes is a sex addict and a bit of a Nazi: after kicking a boyfriend to the ground, “Jack knew that he was being disgusting but bullying Billy aroused him.” Wright isn’t a very nice person either: he describes his Italian-American lover, Pia, as “promiscuous” and “a moron”, but he hopes to “get a good 10 years of sluttishness” out of her before she becomes “too old and fat and irritating”. Still, as he says, “My own cynicism disgusted me.”
Because no one else’s cynicism is mentioned, that “own” irritated this reader. It’s a minor example of White’s major failing: as a prose stylist he’s like a drunken athlete, capable of making a dash for it but unable to walk straight. Sometimes the writing is thoughtless: Jack hardly needs to tell Will that “I was lucky to find this tiny penthouse” when they are actually in the penthouse, on the terrace.
Sometimes the information is bewildering: “Herschel had told him that half of the men and a third of the women on their floor, the eleventh, had made a pass at him” – why is the number of the floor significant? Sometimes the prose is so arch it topples over: “I sort of resented Jack for inadvertently casting this temptation in my path, or was he actively trying to test our marriage, which was complete with adorable children and conspicuous mosses on the old manse?”
The central failing, though, is not the carelessness but the characterisation. Jack and Will are essentially the same person: gay Siamese twins. Attempts to pass off Will as a butch hetero are amusing but implausible, like Shirley Temple Bar playing Tarzan. For example, as Will is about to make love to Pia for the first time he imagines “the easygoing camaraderie of undressing another man, but how dull. How lacking in mystery”.
Nor is the gay maleness confined to the gay males. Pia, for example, talks dirty to Jack, describing in comradely detail an act she finally got Will to let her perform which he was “squeamish” about, but which he liked so much that he “wriggled and moaned like a girl”, though he wouldn’t let her kiss him afterwards. (This is not a book to give your maiden uncle.)
Throughout a long career, White’s fiction has been less important than his role as witness to the story of himself, particularly as libertine, memorialist of the Aids disaster and sternly hedonistic moralist. Here the psychological development of the sternness is the interesting thing. If for White libertinism has been a religion whose god is the orgasm, the religious experience has been altered by the passage of time. In that sense this is a coming-of-old-age novel. That has formal consequences: although Jack and Will are said to be young, they come across as grown-up beyond their years, worn down by the knowledge of what has not yet happened to them.
Will expresses this complex of feelings thus: “Yes, Pia was a woman and I, a man, but we might as well have been gay men for all the bitchiness and shallowness and venereal filth we were wallowing in.” This is how Jack sees it: “He felt embarrassed about his passion for Will and winced when he remembered it. It seemed so childish and self-hating.” As a result he starts seeing “yet another” psychoanalyst. She suggests that he might learn how to feel if he gave up sex.
Although Jack accepts her logic, he can’t stop cruising. His desires are violent, but he feels them only when he is stoned on marijuana; they are also more exciting for his partners than they are for himself. He is a paradoxical creature, guiltily guiltless, unemotional but mad about emotion, sex-mad but revolted by sex, narcissistic but contemptuous of his ego, not so much nihilistic as gnostic, a Manichean obsessed with the pain of compulsory fun.
The curious thing is that despite the undifferentiated characters, the slipshod writing and the moral cruelty, the book radiates a melancholic charm. This charm has a dualistic quality. On the one hand it is worldly, rather as if Casanova had read Proust and decided to imitate him, but without bothering to do the rewrites. On the other hand, less easy to define, the appeal is immaterial – it is startling to realise that the god of White’s religion, the shiver of creation, is always approached, constantly betrayed but never described. This is a book as poignant as it is flawed.
Brian Lynch's second novel, The Woman Not the Name, will be published in the autumn
