As White narrates coming into his own as a writer, The Unpunished Vice grows into a veritable avalanche of interesting books and talented folk: the early admiration of Nabakov, the friendship of John Irving and Joyce Carol Oates, just to name a few, are all described here with wit and candor ... White visits his own books with the lightest of finger taps. Only when a solid correlation in another text, a stylistic point learned or a moment of inspiration, presents itself are we treated to the germinations of his own work, and then often with just a sentence or two ... As a memoir, The Unpublished Vice also serves as an important document chronicling gay literary history (more on that later). The characteristically generous dollops of advice also place this book on the books-for-writers shelf ... the commentary on literary relationships elevates The Unpunished Vice. The stories of nourishing artistic and intellectual camaraderie make the gift of a particular book all the more meaningful, the lessons learned applicable to life, not just the trade of telling tales ... The Unpublished Vice is an exquisite, winding staircase though the rich and varied library of an important writer’s readings; one that, like the very best books, delivers the reader to secret but familiar chambers seemingly—if only—without end.
White...is back with a new book-crazy memoir ... the delightful thing about it is the way White’s personal adventures and omnivorous reading habits intersect. Vice is funny, sexy and continually informed by White’s eagerness to drink down physical and cultural worlds in their entirety ... As Vice jumps from person to person and topic to topic, White keeps returning to the question of what makes fiction masterpieces work ... 'People interested in putting together a very restricted canon of great books don’t really like reading,' he advises us.
...what he cares about is giving the reader a sense of some of the authors he has enjoyed the most, and from whom he has learned the most ... White’s tone is conversational, and while his style is readable and the information is intriguing, the reader is tempted to wonder, 'Why bother?' But patience is a virtue, and in the last 30 pages, White gets down to the nature of the real vice, often punished by readers and critics—no longer covert or overt homosexuality but political ambiguity...White is proposing that moral and biographical complexity is worth a reader’s attention, even if he or she doesn’t agree with the writer’s politics.
... Edmund White, the tone of whose new book, The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading, quite often resembles the gentle whisper of a sweetheart. Ownership, you see, is not at all his style. In fact, he doesn’t claim always to understand the books that he loves most ... White’s book is a collection of essays, each connecting the seemingly thousands of books he has read – I find it impossible to imagine anyone better read than White, though with typical modesty he insists he knows lots of people who are – to his long writing life ... White isn’t in the business of pressing books on the reader. He merely considers them, almost as if he were thinking out loud: why they work, what their particular qualities might be.
Edmund White’s [voice] is that of your gay cousin who dazzles you with enthusiasm for everything he has read (and reread) ... White’s selections in The Unpunished Vice make you feel as if you’re dropping by booths at a literary world’s fair. He is passionate about the genius of Stendhal—a subject on which I would like to sit him down at a table with James Wood.
These opinions — unabashedly opinionated opinions — are White’s stock in trade. They can be eccentric...or baffling ... Usually thoughtful, they always provoke thought ... White’s gimlet-eyed fix on writing style is a different matter ... White’s own celebrated style has such finesse that it routinely invests even commonplaces with elegance ... Whether explicit or implicit, everything here rests on White’s sexuality and is seen through it. Since this is a memoir, and not a treatise, White’s identity and experience remain the focus, but they also bristle with extension ... [he] closes The Unpunished Vice on a note neither facetious, facile, nor flip — on a promise made and kept.
Subtitled 'A Life of Reading,' it maps not a metropolis, but White’s cavernous and idiosyncratic mind. Culled from essays and criticism, it is something between a tell-all confessional, a piece of after-dinner table talk, a lecture series on Great Writers You Should Know, and a rallying cry for the pleasures of reading ... his interest in the pleasures of the body, as well as the pleasures of the page, is as unabashedly frank as ever; as the title suggests, they seem, in White’s view, to proceed from the same source ... it’s when he lingers that the book is at its most illuminating ... Is The Unpunished Vice any more than reheated journalism? It’s difficult to say. Despite thematic linkages, no large theme emerges; what statements there are tend towards the numinous, or the plain obvious ... the best writers are energetic readers, constantly diving for buried treasure. In turn, anyone who encounters this book is likely to emerge with something new and gleaming.
Whether talking about his own writing, writers he has known, gossipy biographical tidbits, the allure of libraries, 'the greatest novel in all literature' or the books he rereads regularly, White generously shares opinions he’s developed over a lifetime and also gives us a plenty of ideas for our own to-read lists ... Somewhat disappointing is the near absence of comment about Genet or Proust. White chose to omit the two French giants, as he wrote biographies of each. Enormously pleasurable, however, is how White can be convincingly enthusiastic about extremely difficult or avant-garde writers and also love a bestselling novelist such as John Irving. It is White’s gift to bring these seeming polarities into some kind of humming unison under a banner extolling the cherished communion between reader and writer.
White vacillates between the curmudgeonly and the wistful as he assesses a changing world tempered by the permanence of literature ... The Unpunished Vice is an unusual hybrid composed of White’s astute literary criticism interlaced with often highly personal stories about friendships, relationships and sex ... While the writing is always engaging, White’s thoughts sometimes seem to meander, and the book might have been tightened with judicious editing. But even in his sometimes irascible, sex-preoccupied dotage, White is a charming and sharp-witted raconteur worth spending time with on the page. The Unpunished Vice is a welcome capstone to the venerable literary career of a writer who has never been afraid to expose his own and others’ fallibility.
White’s prose oozes mysticism and melancholy, the kind of melancholy that makes readers sigh with wonder and hope ... Throughout, White’s reflections are just as lucid as they are fascinating and just as compelling as they are bountiful. A literary delicacy with more takeaways than one can count.
Much of the text has been cobbled together from previously published essays, which at times undermines narrative unity. Given this ad-hoc structure, it’s hardly a surprise that the quality varies widely between sections, with a particularly flimsy chapter devoted to excessive praise of White’s famous novelist friends. Yet even at his most rambling, White’s erudition and charm are everywhere present. At its best, this collection is like a heartfelt conversation with friends over a bottle of wine.
