Jack Holmes and His Friend - Softcover

Edmund White

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1408815176 ISBN 13: 9781408815175

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2012

Synopsis

Jack Holmes is in love. The other men he takes to bed never last long, and it doesn't look as if there will ever be anyone else he falls in love with. Sadly for him, his feelings are not returned, at least not in the way he would like them to be. Will Wright comes from old stock, has aspirations to be a writer, and like Jack works on the Northern Review, where aspirations flourish. This is intense, literary sixties New York. Jack is living with three feisty girls from his college back in Michigan, and Will lives alone, writing his novel. As this brilliantly observed novel unfolds, the lives of Jack and Will will intertwine, and their loves come and go, and they will always be, at the very least, friends. Jack Holmes and his Friend deploys Edmund White's wonderful perceptions of American society to dazzling effect, as character after character is delicately and colourfully rendered and one social milieu after another glows in the reader's mind. He is a connoisseur of the nuances of personality and mood, and here unveils his very human cast in all their radical individuality. With fabulously a point insights, narrative daring and a gifted sense of the rueful rough and tumble of life, the novel is a beautifully sculpted exploration of sexuality and sensibility.

About this title

About the Author

An esteemed novelist and cultural critic, Edmund White is the author of many books including the autobiographical A Boy's Own Story; The Flaneur; a biography of the poet Arthur Rimbaud; Hotel de Dream, a novel; and two memoirs My Lives and City Boy. Edmund White lives in New York City and teaches writing at Princeton University. He is an Officier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and a recipient of the Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Review

Edmund White has three voices. First there is the storyteller, relaxed, conversational, an anecdotalist, an inspired flaneur. Then there is the poet: on every page there lies in wait a metaphor of startling precision, an image that holds and reattracts the eye. And then there is the laic philosopher, who observes human life from the highest altitudes, held aloft by vast infusions of erudition and experience. In Jack Holmes and His Friend, White's trio is in frictionless accord * Martin Amis * Edmund White is one of the best writers of my generation; he's certainly the contemporary American writer I reread more than any other, and the one whose next book I look forward to reading most * John Irving * I can't remember the last time I had this much fun with a novel. Jack Holmes and His Friend is a brilliant, moving and hilarious book from America's wittiest and most urbane writer ... Entirely unforgettable and true. A top-shelf addition to the Edmund White canon * Gary Shteyngart * The acuity of Edmund White's descriptions and the elegance of his imagery are a constant delight * Literary Review * Tender prose ... an elegant study of the paradoxes and half-truths that emerge in long-standing friendships' * New Yorker * White is a marvellous writer. Barely a page passes without some arresting metaphor [and] the social observation is just as sharp * Spectator * His are beautiful explorations of sexuality and sensibility in American society * Observer * Wonderful ... White's writing is beautiful, and he has a superb intimacy with his utterly convincing characters * Saga * A simple, rather moving celebration of platonic friendship * TLS * His narrative [has] a real density and weight ... in the dramatization of suburban life there are elements and echoes of Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road and T.C. Boyle's The Tortilla Curtain; in the exploration by an outsider of class and privilege there are elements and echoes of The Great Gatsby, Brideshead Revisited, and The Line of Beauty. It is also possible to find traces of The Age of Innocence in the way a changing city and a disappointed sensual hero are drawn ... Jack Holmes and His Friend is a comedy of manners, which ingeniously uses the system of doubling the gay hero by offering him an alter ego who is straight. This allows White to move with relish between a man who makes his friends his family and a man who makes a family * Colm Toibin, New York Review of Books * Truly comes to life when White is writing about character's sexual adventures ... White's understanding of the perverse nature of the human heart is as vivid and engaging as it is frustrating * Gay Community News *

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1408815176
• ISBN 13: 9781408815175
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 400