Our Young Man by Edmund White; Bloomsbury, $26
Readers who covet boys with youthful beauty above all else, with their pink, unblemished, cherubic skin and boundless energy, will surely relate to Guy, the central character and the sensual source of jealousy, desire, and hushed resentment in Edmund White's 13th novel Our Young Man .
Armed with a French accent and killer good looks, Guy commands the story right from the opening pages. The novel is a study in extremes set in the heady, fashion-forward, disco-centric era of the 1970s and 80s, and winds its way through the murky shadows of the AIDS epidemic's peak. Early warning of the disease's progression finds the novel's narrator fretting over a new "gay cancer" that had swooped in unannounced and "wiped out a whole house of five on Fire Island."
Beautiful Guy, quite the heartbreaker, has surprisingly continued working as a model even beyond his youth and well into his second decade, and White paints his struggle to stay relevant, even in the New York City of the 1980s, admirably. Guy is a character who obviously loves to be watched and adored, but it soon becomes evident that beauty and brains are not mutually exclusive. Throughout the course of the book, he emerges as somewhat of a pretty mess, particularly when the novel winds its way from Paris into Manhattan. Guy becomes enraptured with Buddhism and is frustrated with the older men his agent introduces him to, who want more than he is able to offer, though he is more than open to accepting sports cars from sadistic old Belgian men or a Fire Island beach house from "a fat man in a sports jacket" with whom he'd slept only once.
White's version of a long-forgotten New York City is bittersweetly depicted, and brims with brilliant nostalgia, a large part of what makes this novel shine. Readers of a certain age will recognize mentions of the Mineshaft sex club, dancing at the Roxy, random celebrity luminaries of the era, the Concorde, and the exquisite bitchiness of working models. As Guy traverses through the men and boys of his life, he also carefully sidesteps the shadows of AIDS, a subject popping up on virtually everyone's casual conversation in those days.
Taking a step back from all of the excess, the paranoid AIDS chatter, and the tumescent gay sex scenes, White's book on a deeper level reflects on the sheer, unrelenting, and enduring vanity of humans. He scrutinizes the lengths some go to deceive others, with the skill and dexterity of vaudeville magicians, into thinking we are younger and more boundless than we really are. Constructing those youthful veils is no easy feat, as Guy himself discovers, and sometimes that vanity takes other's hearts and wallets for granted.
White reminds us of the cruelties of age, time, and disease, but his novel wins out with lust, arrogance, gay sex, and over-the-top boudoir scenes like this one: "Suddenly nothing in the world seemed to Guy more glamorous than homosexuality, as romantic as heady white gardenias nested in polished green leaves." Indeed.