Our Young Man

by Edmund White

Overview

Our Young Man follows the life of a gorgeous Frenchman, Guy, as he goes from the industrial city of Clermont-Ferrand to the top of the modeling profession in New York City's fashion world, becoming the darling of Fire Island's gay community. Like Wilde's Dorian Grey, Guy never seems to age; at thirty-five he is still modeling, still enjoying lavish gifts from older men who believe he's twenty-three--though their attentions always come at a price. Ambivalently, Guy lets them believe, driven especially by the memory of growing up poor, until he finds he needs the lie to secure not only wealth, but love itself. Surveying the full spectrum of gay amorous life through the disco era and into the age of AIDS, Edmund White (who worked at Vogue for ten years) explores the power of physical beauty--to fascinate, to enslave, and to deceive--with sparkling wit and pathos.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781632860026
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	04/05/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	128,542
File size:	449 KB

About the Author

Edmund White is the author of many novels, including A Boy's Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, The Farewell Symphony, and, most recently, Jack Holmes and His Friend. His nonfiction includes City Boy, Inside a Pearl, and other memoirs; The Flâneur, about Paris; and literary biographies and essays. White lives in New York and teaches at Princeton University.
Edmund White (b. Ohio, USA, 1940) is the author of many critically acclaimed books, the most recent being The Flaneur. He was made an officer in the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and won a literary prize from the Festival of Deauville. He now teaches at Princeton University. His acclaimed autobiography, My Lives, was published by Bloomsbury in 2006, while his play, Terre Haute, was published by Methuen Drama in 2007.

Editorial Reviews

Although it's peppered throughout with Dorian Gray references, Our Young Man sticks to the humanly possible, as White toys with the plight of a gay male beauty pushing 40…The book…has a manic chanting rhythm as Guy keeps up the charade of being years younger than he is. Just when Our Young Man seems about to drown in its own superficiality…it becomes an oddly poignant contemplation of what it's like to live "way past" your shelf life and make choices that don't quite match your insouciant appearance…White's prose is as fresh as a series of slaps to the face, filled with reckless energy…As ridiculous as Guy's struggles are, White convinces you they really are struggles—and valiant struggles to boot. By its end, Our Young Man reads less like a Fashion Confidential exposé than a jittery meditation on the strangeness of survival, especially in the age of AIDS…it plays with Wilde's conceit in wily, unexpected ways as it speeds you along with its winningly hectic prose.

The New York Times Book Review - Michael Upchurch

11/23/2015
Guy, a beautiful young man from the French countryside, is picked up by a modeling scout on a church trip to Paris; he rapidly ascends through the Parisian modeling world and crosses the Atlantic with plans to make it big in the New York fashion scene. Guy is gay, which raised no concerns while living in his native France, but upon arrival in New York the apocalyptic bloom of AIDS is just beginning. Both horrified by the epidemic and charmed by the swinging life on Fire Island, Guy must tiptoe carefully as he becomes a fixture of high-spending fashion circles. This balancing act becomes ever more precarious as he develops a relationship with “the baron,” a wealthy hedonist who takes an uncanny interest in the aspiring model. In spite of his adventurous lifestyle, Guy maintains an angelic naïveté and somewhat provincial moral compass—scruples that trip him up as he navigates this new, extravagant world. Handsome and charming, he is a vulnerable target, consistently manipulated by the powerful characters attracted to him. Although the dialogue falters in places, White renders a beautiful portrait of a time in America that was prosperous, carefree, and increasingly toxic. Suffused with sensual writing and wry cultural observations, White’s tale of disco-era Fire Island is a vibrant portrait of a tumultuous age. Agent: Amanda Urban, ICM Partners. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"White’s prose is as fresh as a series of slaps to the face, filled with reckless energy . . . [Our Young Man] plays with [Oscar] Wilde’s conceit in wily, unexpected ways as it speeds you along with its winningly hectic prose." - New York Times Book Review

"White wastes no time delving into the dark, uniquely funny side of the fashion world . . . [A] sad, heartfelt, and comic coming-of-age story." - Interview

"White has proven himself again and again to be one of the finest storytellers of his generation . . . an author who entices his readers with plots that come honey-drizzled in language to which the rest of us can only aspire. White's latest, Our Young Man, displays an author at his peak and fully in control . . . Sleek, witty, a bit raunchy, and fully enticing and entertaining." - New York Journal of Books

"We meet Guy at the dawn of the AIDS crisis, but the novel does the remarkable work of telling Guy’s story with playfulness and enough air that although it’s a substantial work of storytelling, it floats." - Gawker

"Artful . . . An amused tale of our endless capacity for idiocy in the face of stunning beauty . . . All human life is here . . . Trauma, misunderstanding and self-regard: out of these materials White creates not a tragedy but a little human comedy." - Times Literary Supplement

From the Publisher

2016-01-18
White (Jack Holmes and His Friend, 2012, etc.) returns with a playful yet searching novel of gay life in the New York of Ed Koch and Studio 54. Guy, a plainly named young man, is anything but plain: discovered in Paris, he's at the top of the New York modeling world, and he's seemingly ageless, which works to his advantage not just in that business, but also in attracting a string of well-heeled lovers who are convenient but no paragons of true love—and indeed sometimes repellent ("They were introduced and the baron, ugly as a commissar, held on to Guy's hand for an uncomfortably long interval"). A bit of an ingénue and a bit of a Candide, Guy is nonetheless a romantic—not exactly a winning outlook in the Fire Island of four decades past, just at the time that sexual abandon is about to give way to the sober, killing realities of AIDS. Writing with wit and gently arch humor, White explores the cultural differences between France and America, and he limns the distinctions between the gay tribes of Christopher Street ("tall, balding, skinny, pale, tattooed, almost as if they were vagrants who slept rough") and Fire Island ("everyone was in a Speedo pulling a wagon of groceries across the bumpy boardwalk; you couldn't tell the houseboys from the bankers"), between the Minorites and Athenians and Friends of Dorothy. The story proceeds by means of nicely paced dialogue interspersed with reflection and observation, to say nothing of Guy's beauty tips—facial isometrics, Retin-A, "a daily glass of fattening orange juice"—as he builds a life in a time when restrictions are few and appetites endless, though one might have trouble feeling sorry for his narrow regime of visits to the gym, Europe, and Saks. A closely written, multidimensional coming-of-age novel that captures a time of whispers, elaborate codes, and not inconsiderable danger.

Kirkus Reviews