A review by barrypierce
A Boy's Own Story by Edmund White
3.0
On the back of my disappointment with Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You I went to Twitter and meditated on the state of the gay novel. My friend Conrad said I should try out Edmund White. So I did.
A Boy’s Own Story (1982) is a novel about a gay teen’s coming of age in 1950s America. White holds nothing back. Within the first 20 pages we are already reading about our narrator’s rendezvous with a younger boy, Kevin. Kevin is 12 and our narrator is 15 but Kevin already knows the ropes when it comes to ‘cornholing’. These first couple of pages act as an admonition to the reader, you can hear White tapping at his keys, ‘I am not going to hold back’. The unabashed portrayal of teenage sexuality is so wonderfully refreshing. This novel is far more than just sex however.
Our narrator faces genuine struggles. Throughout the novel he chastises himself for being homosexual. At times he wishes he wasn’t. His father sends him to boarding school in order to straighten him out (pun intended). His life is a series of unfulfilling encounters and perpetual self-hate. The novel rejects the conventional bildungsroman narrative. We jump around the narrator’s life because that seems to be the only thing that he’s able to control, us. In her original review for the NYT, Catherine Stimpson described A Boy’s Own Life as The Catcher in the Rye meets Wilde’s De Profundis. It’s a fair comparison but White recedes into depths that Salinger could only dream about.
While I will admit that the novel can get boring in some parts I overall really admired A Boy’s Own Life. It acts as a reminder to me that for every middling book you read there’s always a great one to counteract it. I will most definitely be continuing on with Edmund White’s oeuvre.
A Boy’s Own Story (1982) is a novel about a gay teen’s coming of age in 1950s America. White holds nothing back. Within the first 20 pages we are already reading about our narrator’s rendezvous with a younger boy, Kevin. Kevin is 12 and our narrator is 15 but Kevin already knows the ropes when it comes to ‘cornholing’. These first couple of pages act as an admonition to the reader, you can hear White tapping at his keys, ‘I am not going to hold back’. The unabashed portrayal of teenage sexuality is so wonderfully refreshing. This novel is far more than just sex however.
Our narrator faces genuine struggles. Throughout the novel he chastises himself for being homosexual. At times he wishes he wasn’t. His father sends him to boarding school in order to straighten him out (pun intended). His life is a series of unfulfilling encounters and perpetual self-hate. The novel rejects the conventional bildungsroman narrative. We jump around the narrator’s life because that seems to be the only thing that he’s able to control, us. In her original review for the NYT, Catherine Stimpson described A Boy’s Own Life as The Catcher in the Rye meets Wilde’s De Profundis. It’s a fair comparison but White recedes into depths that Salinger could only dream about.
While I will admit that the novel can get boring in some parts I overall really admired A Boy’s Own Life. It acts as a reminder to me that for every middling book you read there’s always a great one to counteract it. I will most definitely be continuing on with Edmund White’s oeuvre.