Review by Booklist Review
The young narrator of White's A Boy's Own Story (Dutton, 1982) leaves prep school for college and later begins his first job in New York City, but otherwise his personality seems set, both in his antibourgeois and prointellectual attitudes as well as in his still emerging homosexual identity. Since his erotic tastes are well established, he requires no guide to the gay world, just a bit of definition and fine-tuning as he drifts from one man to another on a path of sexual self-discovery. Unfortunately, the story often descends into camp and aesthetic pretentiousness, and the moral climax at the Stonewall uprising comes across as dramatically unconvincing, however politically correct. Further, the combination of White's self-consciously Jamesian style of writing with the John Rechy-like exploration of bars and toilets presents a great critical hurdle. While White's book may make a case for a life or even a life-style, it never quite succeeds in becoming a novel. JB.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This sequel to A Boy's Own Story is a satisfying successor to that acclaimed 1982 novel, taking the narrator through the 1950s and '60s as he matures as a gay man at the University of Michigan and later in New York. Some of White's previous fiction (Forgetting Elena, Caracole) has been considered opaque and inaccessible, but his discursive stylea modified stream of consciousness that leans luxuriantly and effectively on metaphor and simileaptly suits A Boy's Own Story and this novel, both books of memory, never too tightly plotted, but always revelatory of character and milieu as a wise narrator dissects his past and the web of his relationships with family, lovers and friends. Life in the novel is life as it is remembered, and the two novels form the lyrical but politically pointed fictional autobiography of a homosexual recalling his youth (in A Boy's Own Story) and, in this novel, the last years of psychological self-oppression and the first sweet years of liberation. White's gift for dialogue and anecdote and the melancholy elegance of his prose (often at odds with the spiteful tone the narrator takes) persuade the reader to suspend judgment as the author suspends time, to move with the narrator back and forth between past and deeper past, to delve deeper inside the soul of a man whose spiritual and sexual odysseys chart the development and joyfully confirm the existence of the elusive notion of ``gay sensibility.'' (March) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
White, generally recognized as one of the most influential of modern gay authors, continues the coming-of-age tale begun in a Boy's Own Story ( LJ 9/1/82). He follows our nameless hero from his final year at prep school in the mid-1950s through his cruisy but self-deprecating college years to the ``turning point'' in his lifethe famous Stonewall uprising of 1969 in which the clients of a New York gay bar stood up to the policemen trying to close it down. What emerges is the picture of a young man desperately struggling to come to terms with himself, a struggle that is a universal even if the context for every individual is different. Artfully constructed, this work clearly transcends its ``gay'' theme. Explicit at times, it remains highly recommended. David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, Fl. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Sequel to White's autobiographical childhood novel A Boy's Own Story (1982) that carries the nameless narrator from sexual awakening through college and young manhood in Chicago to gay paradise in Greenwich Village. The cloying style that drained A Boy's Own Story and made a glutinous mess of Caracole (1985) is kept under control here. With everything seen in less voluptuous lighting, the new novel reveals itself as a plotless paste-up--with clearly heartfelt but far-from-intriguing description standing in for incident. But just when you think nothing is going to happen, the last quarter of the book achieves an inspired breakthrough. Before then, the narrator's family appears vaguely and threateningly, with Dad going purple with anger about his son's queerness, and with Mom hustling him off to a shrink. The shrink turns out to be sicker than his patients. Meanwhile, the narrator tries to make sexual contact with Maria, a sculptress, who becomes his live-in lesbian buddy--a tie that lacks drama and never achieves the taste of honey it seeks. For a decade the narrator resists his homosexuality while giving in to the most degrading (and lively) cruising and to his compulsion to give quick sex in the college toilets--a compulsion that finally bursts into dramatic fireworks when the narrator lets it carry him to the sexual world of filthy, reeking New York subway toilets during rush hour. From this point on, until Judy Garland's death on the evening of the Stonewall tavern riot, two or three struggling gays take on some weight and breadth but remain minor notes in the saga. So, praise for restraint, especially for the less lyrical style--but, all in all, these scraps are nothing new. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
