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Summary: I loved the ending...
Review: What would we do without Edmund White? All of us who came of age in the seventies and survived. He is our chronicler. This is one of his best books so far. Although the story is quite singular and even ordinary, it resonates deeply with gay lives -- and their contradictions -- everywhere. I disagree with the other reviewers who feel the book is pretentious, and gets lost in its bicultural characters. It is a delicate, sad, wise, and hopeful book.
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Summary: White Delivers a Classic for our Age
Review: Recently I was preparing a lecture on bioethics from a Hindu perspective for a group of physicians (turned Christian ministers) and had to reconcile the overt parallels of the Hindu gospels to the later Christian ones. A friend helping me suggested that five thousand years ago the human gene pool was almost singular, thus universal relfections may tend to follow common trajectories. The career of Edmund White is a case of hypermodernity; his writing has meandered (and arguably defined) gay identities and liberation while considering the universal human topics of life, death and love in a turbulent face paced age. More importantly, and the mark of his absolute success is that he transcends identity politics to find a human core of raw emotions that define living in the world. In my opinion, the Married Man marks this passsage. It is a classic that will be remembered in history.
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Summary: HERE, LOOK AT THIS MESS
Review: There have been moments in the days since I've finished this novel (is it a novel?) when I think it must be one of the best I've read in years and other moments when I'm sure it's one of the worst. It's like looking at a painting by Francis Bacon: on one hand, the observer admires the obvious genius, the use of color, but, on the other hand, the constant evisceration becomes too much, the lumps and contortions, the flesh opened up to reveal pink meat. White has "humanized" his characters to the point of making then unlikeable. Austin farts in bed and the chapter ends. Grown men whine at Disneyland. He becomes lyrical only in his descriptions of things, the bateaux mouches along the Seine, the woods across the street in Providence, an art nouveau table. The only character who is not opened to reveal the stink of pink meat is Ajax, his dying lover's loyal basset hound, and even he has a gland near his tail that needs deflated. White is too brilliant not to be in control of these impressions; this duality is a theme throughout the book, heroism and whining self-pity, a lover's emrace and a fart, a consumate knowledge of 18th century French furniture and fisting. He engages our intellect but not our emotions. I understand the negative comments from other readers here; the characters ARE frustrating. Austin criticizes "ghetto" gay culture but embraces (or at least forgives) the self-loathing and silence of most of the gay (homosexual) characters in the novel. The author, though, is aware (I hope) of all of these contradictions and means to say, "Here, look at this mess called living and dying." In that sense, then, there can be no catharsis or redemption or swelling music or epiphany; there can be no novel.
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Summary: A stunning novel by Edmund White
Review: I was dazzled by this book from the very first page. The characters are beautifully drawn in all their complexities and contradictions. As always, White's prose is luminous, the sort of writing you read aloud to friends. And the novel is deeply moving to boot. I've been enormously frustrated with some newspaper reviews I've read of "Married Man" -- some critics have dismissed it as "another gay novel." The number of gay populated novels is minuscule compared to the thousands of hetero novels out ecah year. Do we call them just "another straight novel"? This is a beautiful book, and Edmund White's best work.
Rating: 
Summary: A Negative and Cynical Book
Review: The problem I had with this book was the idea that gays had their own set of morals - low and nearly non-existant. The characters changed their morals as quickly as they changed their shirt. Austin hungers for Little Julien not for the love they had but for "the best sex I ever had". A cynical and sad look at gay life.
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Summary: A boring and pretentious novel
Review: This novel has an interesting premise in the gay narrator's meeting a handsome young Frenchman (married) at a gym and unexpectedly falling in love with him. However, the novel soon becomes another opportunity for the author to parade his knowledge of French culture and to look down his nose at Americans. There isn't much story here, and neither of the main characters is likable at all.
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Summary: Well-written but pretentious
Review: This novel, though well-written at times, has a major problem in its choice of characters, all of whom are pretentious expatriates who consider themselves SO superior to stupid Americans (that would be us, the readers). The story itself is ordinary and rather banal, distinguished only, and very occasionally, by the author's adroit use of language. Anyone looking for an actual story or characters outside a very small range of spoiled artistic types, however, should look elsewhere.
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Summary: International Tragedy
Review: "The Married Man" is the saga of Austin, an expatriate American writer in Paris (obviously modeled on the author) and his ultimately tragic relationship with a young, married Frenchman, Julien.The story sweeps through diverse locales, Paris, Providence (Rhode Island), Venice, Key West and Morocco among them, with assured ease and a real sense of place. White's descriptive and evocative powers are fully in evidence as a multitude of sharply drawn characters pass through the lovers' lives. Ultimately, though, the focus is on the inevitable death of Julien from AIDS. What starts as a drawing-room comedy gathers a harrowing emotional power as the younger man steadily sickens, and finally dies in the deserts of Africa. White's most impressive achievement is his success at portraying the helplessness of the human spirit in the face of snowballing catastrophe. No tender farewells, no fine speeches here--their final hours together find Austin desperately trying to get a raging, incontinent Julien to medical aid that comes too little, too late. "The Married Man" is a fine and haunting narrative.
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Summary: More Pages from a Great Writer
Review: I'm writing this out of indignation at the spiteful customer review headlined Sick People are Boring Too. Well, what's really boring is people who insist on making mean, highly personal judgments about great literature. Should Ed White's job really be to dumb down his stories so that they don't awaken the envy of readers like the anonymous reader from New York (who just might be a frustated novelist)? Mr. White is one of our finest, most intelligent observers of the social scene and I consider myself lucky each time he publishes more of his wonderful pages.
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Summary: Sick people are boring too
Review: The privileged bores who people this slow-moving novel take forever to come a little bit alive on the page. White seems to think that giving a character HIV is enough to fascinate readers. It takes more than that. Set in Paris, this is SOOOOOO precious, it's extremely hard to relate to. I could barely make it to the end. And when I did I realized it hadn't been worth the trouble.
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