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A review by moodswinger
City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s by Edmund White
4.0
This one is a tough book to rate. Edmund White devotes much of the book to namedropping and gossip, which can be a complete delight if you know which famous figure he's talking about (oh, those 10 pages about Vladimir Nabokov--I could've read a whole book like that!) or mind-numbing if you don't. The sections about his stays in Venice and The People to Know in Venice were hard to get through.
City Boy is my first White book. I came to him through Randy Shilts' And the Band Played On, as White was a GMHC founder. I wasn't aware just what a social climber White is! He owes much of his career to his friends, so it's a bit of a mystery (even to himself, by his own admission) that he pulled such a dick move on Susan Sontag and her son by trashing them in Caracole.
On the other hand, it makes sense for Larry Kramer (another GMHC founder) to invite White and ensure that he was a member. Edmund White was invited because he was a big name among gay writers, but outside of those circles as well. How many writers can say that Nabokov called their first novel a "marvelous book", that Sontag pulled strings to get him awards, and that he was friends, or at least friendly, with James Merrill, Michel Foucault, Robert Mapplethorpe, Peggy Guggenheim, and Jasper Johns? All of this is information I learned from this book, so you can guess just what amount of gossip and namedropping was involved.
But I would say that Edmund White is a striking writer. City Boy can get tiring, but it also contains a lot of laugh out loud moments, evocative descriptions of his friends, and complex philosophical ideas made simple enough to understand all at once. White has a vast vocabulary, and you're bound to learn at least one new word.
One strike against this memoir is that White meanders seemingly pointlessly for about 95%, to pull the whole thing together beautifully in the last few pages. I choked back tears, heartbroken, while reading that last section; a section that went over all of the friends who died from AIDS, that loss of a generation which was replaced by a sleeker, safer New York. The New York that Edmund White describes in the book is unsafe and dirty, but it also enabled a Midwestern nobody like Edmund White to more or less support himself until he started publishing reliably.
It's this last section which pushed the book to a 4-star rating, when I was almost certain it would be three. This is a book that deserves a re-read, it deserves a project to go through all the names, link them to their work, to pictures and to their literary, academic or historical importance. It also invites comparisons between Kramer and White. Undoubtedly, Kramer would've loved to have half the friends and influence that White does--although I'm sure he doesn't care much anymore. I guess the difference is that while Kramer is an off-putting, self-righteous man who demands to be listened (and I love him for it!), White must have a much more pleasant personality. Or so, I figure, Sontag must've thought until Caracole.
City Boy is my first White book. I came to him through Randy Shilts' And the Band Played On, as White was a GMHC founder. I wasn't aware just what a social climber White is! He owes much of his career to his friends, so it's a bit of a mystery (even to himself, by his own admission) that he pulled such a dick move on Susan Sontag and her son by trashing them in Caracole.
On the other hand, it makes sense for Larry Kramer (another GMHC founder) to invite White and ensure that he was a member. Edmund White was invited because he was a big name among gay writers, but outside of those circles as well. How many writers can say that Nabokov called their first novel a "marvelous book", that Sontag pulled strings to get him awards, and that he was friends, or at least friendly, with James Merrill, Michel Foucault, Robert Mapplethorpe, Peggy Guggenheim, and Jasper Johns? All of this is information I learned from this book, so you can guess just what amount of gossip and namedropping was involved.
But I would say that Edmund White is a striking writer. City Boy can get tiring, but it also contains a lot of laugh out loud moments, evocative descriptions of his friends, and complex philosophical ideas made simple enough to understand all at once. White has a vast vocabulary, and you're bound to learn at least one new word.
One strike against this memoir is that White meanders seemingly pointlessly for about 95%, to pull the whole thing together beautifully in the last few pages. I choked back tears, heartbroken, while reading that last section; a section that went over all of the friends who died from AIDS, that loss of a generation which was replaced by a sleeker, safer New York. The New York that Edmund White describes in the book is unsafe and dirty, but it also enabled a Midwestern nobody like Edmund White to more or less support himself until he started publishing reliably.
It's this last section which pushed the book to a 4-star rating, when I was almost certain it would be three. This is a book that deserves a re-read, it deserves a project to go through all the names, link them to their work, to pictures and to their literary, academic or historical importance. It also invites comparisons between Kramer and White. Undoubtedly, Kramer would've loved to have half the friends and influence that White does--although I'm sure he doesn't care much anymore. I guess the difference is that while Kramer is an off-putting, self-righteous man who demands to be listened (and I love him for it!), White must have a much more pleasant personality. Or so, I figure, Sontag must've thought until Caracole.