Rating: 
Summary: Not perfect, but very moving
Review: Mr White has created a complex, if slightly mannered, world. Though the characters can be guarded and jaded, there is true love between them. What speaks volumes is the dedication of Austin and Julien to each other, their friends, family and past lovers. As in real life, people don't always treat each other nicely, but the caring shines through the hurt. In some places I wished for much less detail. In others I felt I missed whole chapters. In the end Mr White tells the story of a beautiful, complicated romance. Finally, I'd like to say that I try to avoid AIDS memoirs - as common now as coming out stories - but this novel rises above the feel-good "group of gay friends" genre.
Rating: 
Summary: A Contemporary Parable
Review: Edmund White's gifts as an author are indisputable. Whether he sweeps us along in schlastic AND entertaining bigoraphies(Genet and Proust), explores the tenderness of gay relationships ( The Beautiful Room is Empty, A Boy's Own Story, The Farewell Symphony, etc) or just simply writes a novel like his current "The Married Man", he continues to affirm his gifts of powerful imagery, unique observation of the mundane, and just plain story telling. But I find this current book more than the sum of his gifts; I think we have a powerful parable here that addresses the vulnerability and indomitabilty of the human spirit in times of profound stress. Others have accomplished this in writing about the Great Plague of the Middle Ages, the Holocoaust of the last centtury, the countless wars that have produced some of our best poets ( Wilfrid Owen, Walt Whitman, WH Auden, Siegfried Sassoon, etc....). White draws upon the blight of the AIDS epidemic and its smoldering aftermath to place his characters at the stake and find redemption. This is a splendid love story (stories) that keeps us wondering about the bizarre reasons we choose our "soulmates", our lovers, until the final chapters. A Married Man is more about how we elect to let the world know us, of how we hide who we are - at times even from ourselves. The inevitable disasters that accompany living with a mask are not condemned here, but whispered as an argument for how we survive despite our attempts to be self sufficient. If there is an overlying message in White's opus (and there, in truth, are many in this wise novel!) it is that compassion is our antidote to the inevitablity of death no matter what course our life takes. Whether we have been care givers or care receivers during this time of AIDS, this book will touch even the flintiest reader.
Rating: 
Summary: Not really worth reading
Review: Austin Smith is a middle-aged American writer, living in Paris, looking for new love from men. He meets Julien, a young married man... I enjoyed reading 'A Boy's Own Story', written by this writer, which I rated very highly, and therefore I thought I would read another book by Edmund White. However, 'The Married Man' was a disappointing read. 'The Married Man' lacks much in the way of plot. Instead, its content depends mainly on the main character leading a not spectacularly unusual life, but travelling from place to new place and to new venues far too often, extravagantly, rather than working, so the writer can then describe in detail yet another set of new scenes and events and characters and yet more huge expenditure in the new place/venue. That method of creating a book, and the absence of much interesting plot besides, made the book tiresome after a while. I felt I was being made to read material that had being written simply in order to pad the book out unnecessarily. The content itself becomes quite depressing in the second half of the book. The style of writing, often with very long turgid sentences and over-complicated similes, suggests the book has been too overwritten ('A Boy's Own Story', in contrast, had a much more interesting, direct, snappy style of writing to it). Frankly, the main characters aren't likeable (apart from Ajax). This book was slow going to read, and not a pleasurable experience: more a grim slow turning of the pages, just to finish the thing off. The writer hasn't really attempted any form of climax to the book, or even a good ending, either. He just lets the book tail off into nothingness after 310 pages. Overall, this didn't seem to me to be a book worth reading, and I was sorry to have spent time going through it.
Rating:
Summary: Les choses que nous faisons pour l'amour
Review: Edmund White's 'The Married Man' is the first work I have read by this author written in the third person, which was a far cry from the three prior novels I devoured last year, his autobiographical 'Boy's Own Story' trilogy. In picking up this book, I entered it with a sneaking suspicion that the two main characters; Austin and Julien, were variations on White himself, and his lover Hubert Sorin. Austin is an author, like White himself. Sorin was an architect, just as Julien is when Austin meets him. Sorin passed away in 1994 of AIDS complications, the novel is set in that same time period...etc, etc, etc,....there are too many parallels to White's own story for it not to be a continuation of where he left off with 'The Farewell Symphony'. And so, the choice to tell the story as an 'observer' or 'outsider' by writing it in the third person is a matter of curiosity to me...as if White himself could not 'make the story real' by putting himself into it as narrator...like the story as a whole is still too painful for him to tell as his own. About 100 pages into this novel, I emailed a new acquaintance with some thoughts that the protagonist and his lover were both 'unlikable' characters to me...Austin came across as extremely co-dependent; Julien as selfish, emotionally protracted, and abusive. Through the circumstances of the story, it is hard to not feel a degree of sympathy for both the characters eventually, but initially it was hard (for me) to become engaged with either one of them. As in the other novels I have read by the same author, White has a 'baring of the soul' approach to character development unlike most authors I have read. They are self-effacing; emotionally raw; virtually unable to hide any unattractive facet or character flaw from their chronicler...White lays out most all his characters like 'open wounds' and invites readers to gape at them. The story itself, that of an HIV positive man who meets and falls in love with an initially married man, who then finds himself succumbing to full-blown AIDS...is full of the same emotions I have found in other works by White. While I experienced a feeling of malaise with the co-dependency of Austin, and the abrasiveness of Julien, White labels Austin as co-dependent by the end of the story; and Julien's story becomes so heart-wrenching that it is near impossible to not try to understand the anguish invoking his treatment of those around him, especially Austin...as if his relationship with Austin was the most honest, because he displayed his real feelings to him, and didn't sugar coat them like he did with others...who in retrospect called him 'always cheerful and good-natured'... While I enjoyed this novel overall, I have to give it only 4 stars in rating it, due to the fact that I think White's writing is a lot less 'detached' when it is written in first person. I would have to explore another third person novel to really make an informed conclusion, but...in comparing Married Man to the other three I have read...they come across as if White was far more 'involved' in them by inserting himself as narrator. However, this is a good read by a wonderful author, and I recommend it highly.
Rating: 
Summary: Beautiful, subtly rendered and tragic
Review: *The Married Man* is a memoir and tribute to Edmund White's lover who died of AIDS. The book captures reader's attention as soon as one reads the first paragraph. Austin Smith is an American furniture scholar living in Paris. Pushing fifty and without love, at the gym he met Julien who claimed to be bisexual. The trivial chance encounter gradually matures into a relationship of unspeakable intensity. The sero-discordant couple flee to Providence, Rhode Island as Austin secures a teaching post. White explores with details the challenges of this couple who root from different cultural values, ages, incomes, and languages. Problems aggrevate when AIDS-stricken ex-lover can't stand the current sweetheart. White's prose is beautiful, eatil-oriented, and root-to-the-spot. White would never forfeit the details that build a relationship: things like speech etiquettes, a nickname, a provoked thought, an argument, frustration caused by age difference, even jealous thought. As Austin found out about Julien's AIDS status, the couple deals with Julien's imminent death with a low but sober profile. From Providence, in a quest to save both health and happiness, they traveled to Venice to sun-drenched Key West and eventually Morroco. White delves deeper into human emotion and motivation than any author who writes fiction on AIDS. What he reveals here between Austin and Julien is not always pleasant or expected, but rather subtly rendered and poignant. Medical condition and the turmoil from which is delved fully: euthanasia, taxopasmosis, etc. The novel is heatbreaking yet stands as an honest account of the love story between two courageous men. 3.8 stars.
Rating:
Summary: A Tad Depressing Tragic Tale of Love
Review: I must grant Edmund White with a wonderful writing style. He got us to know know and like the key characters in this book, Julien & Austin. The storyline lacked stories behind the stories. It seemed a little too blanketed/general. There was something missing. I enjoyed it and did read it to the end, getting some worthwhile lines out of the writer. The character who was dying of AIDS made me feel a bit depressed. I haven't read a lot of books along these lines but I know there are a lot of them on this subject matter. If any reader has already gone there (where a key character dies of AIDS) there's no point in re-visiting...just a warning.
Rating:
Summary: Exquisitely written, yet too parochial and detached
Review: With a keen eye for detail and his acknowledged skill at crafting exquisite prose, Edmund White offers a perceptive portrait of three jet-setting gay men and the havoc wreaked on their lives by AIDS in the early 1990s. The first 200 pages focus on the travails and travels of the main characters: Austin, who is nearly 50 as the novel opens and who pursues relationships with a series of men nearly half his age; his lover Julien, a young French man who is married (although a month away from being divorced) when he meets Austin; and Austin's ex-lover Peter, only slightly older than Julien and in declining health from AIDS-related illnesses. Julien and Peter end up hating each other, even though they are quite alike, except in their attitudes toward being gay: "Peter respected gay life as it was--mindless, sexual if not sexy, procrustean--whereas Julien was too much of a lawgiver to accept the rules handed down by the tribe." For whatever reason, White chooses to portray three men who, along with nearly all their friends, represent an extraordinarily narrow swath of gay (white) humanity--and who are not particularly likeable. Austin is descended from Southern gentry, Julien has aristocratic pretensions, and Peter is a preppie WASP from Connecticut; all three are unemployed (or underemployed), and all three have far too much time on their hands. Although none of them is especially intelligent, they share a patrician worldview, enjoy seemingly unlimited financial reserves, and travel to Rome, to Disney World, to Key West, to New England, to Canada, to Mexico, to Morocco. Since this is a character novel with little in the way of plot or story, whether you enjoy it may depend on whether you find the wine-and-cheese set all that interesting. In the Edwardian novels of Henry James or E. M. Forster, such characters are fascinating because of their eccentricities and wit. In a turn-of-the-millennium American novel about AIDS, however, it's almost inevitable that White's protagonists come across as insufferable, pampered, and shallow snobs. I doubt many readers will share Austin's astonishment that a letter from Julien's father "had two spelling mistakes and two mistakes in grammar." (The horror!) The last third of the novel deals with the illness of one of the characters. No one would ever accuse White of being manipulative or maudlin, but here he tends to the other extreme, adopting an aloof, almost journalistic stance as he describes the deteriorating health of a person suffering from AIDS and the stress placed on the caregiver. For those of us who have lost friends to AIDS, this nearly clinical portrayal seems a pale imitation of the actual ordeal. Where is the anger? the tenderness? the misery? the fear? Only during the final days do such emotions enter the narrative; it's as if White saved all his passion for the final march to death and for the self-incrimination and guilt that haunts the survivors. Yet even in these last two terrifying chapters he intersperses sentences that could have been lifted from a cheap tourist guide ("Zagora, an ugly modern town, was squeezed into the crook of the elbow of the Draa . . . the soaring date palms protecting the almond and lemon trees from the sun and, they, in turn, shading the plots of wheat and barley"). In spite of its brilliantly evocative prose, then, "The Married Man" is too earnest and parochial to transcend the narrow confines of the milieu it describes, too detached and dispassionate to convey the horrors of living with AIDS.
Rating:
Summary: Fortunately a bargain book
Review: Having enjoyed other books by Mr. White in the past, I was enthusiastic about ordering this book. Once into it, however, I was bored silly with the self-pitying Austin, much time is spent on his concern with being 50-something and increasingly fat; the girly whimpering princess-like Peter; and the neurotic, poorly adjusted, lecturing Julien. Not to mention the nauseous youngsters that early on make up Austin's Paris social group. Another negative was the revolting obsession of this book with the European bourgeois, always present with it's titled people, nobility and wannabes, creme-de-la-creme socialites and the gaseous Austin's attachment to all the above. Austin's character to me was weak and unbelievable, heaping gifts and adoration on everyone he had met in the past regardless of how they treated him. The only portion of this book I found interesting and in keeping with the quality writing style of Mr. White was the brief fling Austin had in Providence with the homeless man recently out of prison. I found the main love story sugary and mundane, the characters dull, and the constant berating of American culture overdone. To summarize this book, I would considering it the droning love lost lament of a middle-aged pedophile socialite absorbed with the lifestyle of the rich of Paris.
Rating:
Summary: Men Behaving Badly
Review: While I enjoyed the author's excellent writing style, I at first thought he was attempting to show us a portrait of human beings "warts and all," but as I came to the novel's end I concluded that despite his attempts to the contrary, Mr. White has given us a book peopled with ultimately unlikeable characters. My life experience has not been enriched by being introduced to the selfish, whiny Peter, the capricious and immature Julien, and the priggish, self-congratulatory Austin. Good riddance to The Married Man and all its characters!
Rating:
Summary: A modern classic
Review: Precise words, elegant narrative, soberb style. Edmund White is probably the closest thing we have to Henry James nowadays. Touching novel. And I didn't even finish yet.
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