Rating: 
Summary: An overrated piece of literature, gay or otherwise
Review: White's books are a mixed bag. His collection of essays, "The Burning Library," is an important work, and the material in "Nocturnes for the King of Naples" is handled subtly without being needlessly obscure. "A Boy's Own Story," though, is an overrated book. White includes some incredibly soft, well-done sexual scenes, but destroys any empathy for his character by making him selfish, with no caring for anyone around him. If, as some readers and critics think, this is a semi-autobiographical piece, White was an unbelievably self-absorbed adolescent; however, if autobiographical, White should be commended for writing honestly about himself, not obscuring truth for the sake of creating a "nice" image. That having been said, "A Boy's Own Story" really says nothing that has not been said before about sexuality or human nature, either now, or when it was released in the early 1980s. The subject of coming out of the closet and dealing with life has been handled rather differently, but with stronger emotional and psychological insight, in everything from the 1950s Fritz Peters novel "Finistere" to Rita Mae Brown's early 1970s "Rubyfruit Jungle." Finding any insight that makes "A Boy's Own Story" worth reading is difficult. Humans can be shallow and self-absorbed? The coming-out process is a hard row to how, especially complicated by the sexual urges and nature of the beast? This has been written before, and with better characterizations to boot. Ultimately, the book is better viewed as a widely-read example of the "coming-out novel" than as any piece of great literature.
Rating:
Summary: An overrated piece of literature, gay or otherwise
Review: White's books are a mixed bag. His collection of essays, "The Burning Library," is an important work, and the material in "Nocturnes for the King of Naples" is handled subtly without being needlessly obscure. "A Boy's Own Story," though, is an overrated book. White includes some incredibly soft, well-done sexual scenes, but destroys any empathy for his character by making him selfish, with no caring for anyone around him. If, as some readers and critics think, this is a semi-autobiographical piece, White was an unbelievably self-absorbed adolescent; however, if autobiographical, White should be commended for writing honestly about himself, not obscuring truth for the sake of creating a "nice" image. That having been said, "A Boy's Own Story" really says nothing that has not been said before about sexuality or human nature, either now, or when it was released in the early 1980s. The subject of coming out of the closet and dealing with life has been handled rather differently, but with stronger emotional and psychological insight, in everything from the 1950s Fritz Peters novel "Finistere" to Rita Mae Brown's early 1970s "Rubyfruit Jungle." Finding any insight that makes "A Boy's Own Story" worth reading is difficult. Humans can be shallow and self-absorbed? The coming-out process is a hard row to how, especially complicated by the sexual urges and nature of the beast? This has been written before, and with better characterizations to boot. Ultimately, the book is better viewed as a widely-read example of the "coming-out novel" than as any piece of great literature.
Rating: 
Summary: I guess it's official now
Review: With its recent re-publication by the oh-so-tony Modern Library, Edmund White's _A Boy's Own Story_ has officially left the semi-pornographic demimonde of Gay lit, and entered the domain of canonical American fiction. For this reason alone it merits at least a passing glance from readers interested in the state of the written word. Twenty years ago, this slight little book was hailed as the Great Gay American Novel -- and, for better or for worse (often the latter), it still is.What intrigues me most about this novel, however, is not its portrait of an emerging Gay/male consciousness (a plot which has been done nearly to death by now), but the way it toys with its own overall chronology. Unlike a typical bildungsroman, the novel's episodes are not narrated in sequential order, but in an elliptical, interlocking fashion. Think of the oddball three-act structure of Tarantino's film _Pulp Fiction_, and you'll have a solid idea of White's scrambled sense of time. (Of course, the style is completely different: White's placid Francophilic prose, reminiscent not so much of Proust as of Julian Green, is self-consciously "literary" and retrograde -- not at all like Tarantino's jittery, overcaffeinated camera eye.) To this particular Modern Library edition, Allan Gurganus has contributed a typically long-winded foreword. My advice: Skip it and go directly to the novel. White himself also weighs in with a brief afterword on the novel's reception, and its impact on his overall career as a writer. It makes a pleasing endnote to this boy's tale, and it's definitely worth a read.
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