White writes of this world with great humour and knowingness and while he is clear-eyed about its absurdity, he never descends to savage satire. This open-heartedness, an essential White quality, makes his writing sparkle with generosity ... While so inexorably tethered to materiality, it is also a book that floats above things, so light is its touch, so playful and joyous its execution.
The book itself has a manic chanting rhythm as Guy keeps up the charade of being years younger than he is. Just when Our Young Man seems about to drown in its own superficiality — a heady mix of name-dropping, dieting strategies and drug binges — it becomes an oddly poignant contemplation of what it’s like to live 'way past' your shelf life and make choices that don’t quite match your insouciant appearance.
It’s in New York that White’s novel comes most alive, even if Guy remains indistinct to both himself and the reader ... But Our Young Man is not without its disappointments and failures. The novel’s sex scenes, for instance, too often recall those in Gordon Merrick’s overwrought 1970 gay novel, The Lord Won’t Mind, in which there’s quite a lot of what one might think of as men erotically brandishing their gleaming swords.
White’s ability to peel away the idealized image exposes the labor involved in maintaining and manufacturing that image. In so doing, he asks serious questions about the kind of life created by and generative of post-Liberation gay identity ... The contemporary gay world is much more expansive than this novel can offer, but it’s still fun to return to the intimate world of Edmund White.
His new novel, Our Young Man, is about 'the usual,' from an Edmund White we’ve met before but are always happy revisiting — smart, worldly, erudite, well-connected, and funny, in this case writing about gay society in early 1980s New York as seen from the point of view of a newly arrived French male model. It’s a witty reversal of a reliable Jamesian formula White has used elsewhere... Most of the time, events are seen from Guy’s perspective, and he’s a fairly reliable narrator... Much of the tension of the narrative comes from hindsight, our knowing what the characters don’t about that pitiless disease [AIDS], and from our wish to save them... But this is not an AIDS novel, it’s a picaresque story of one person’s life and career, and a comedy of manners ... Our Young Man is informative, wise, and amusing, and you can’t help wondering who the originals were, though you know, of course, that it’s only a novel.
It’s not clear on what terms White’s novel is attempting to succeed. Guy’s love and career plots are not suspenseful in the conventional sense: Most of his lovers come and go in episodic and overlapping fashion, and after decades spent worrying about when he’s going to lose his looks and livelihood, Guy faces the inevitable offstage ... As Guy lacks insight and faces no significant obstacles, the reader is forced to fall back on his day-to-day mental state, which tends toward polite embarrassment, be it at his own good looks or his avarice.
It would be an exaggeration to call the book an AIDS novel, but the specter of the disease lingers in the background of Guy’s life. The lack of awareness that Guy and the rest of the world have about the disease — how it spreads, what causes it — is especially chilling ... while Our Young Man is not an overtly political work, it does perform the important task of helping to reclaim the subject of physical love between men, one that is all too often restricted to polite euphemisms and subtle hints. For this reason alone, Our Young Man stands as an important novel.
