Jack Holmes and His Friend - Softcover

Edmund White

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1408830272 ISBN 13: 9781408830277

Publisher: Bloomsbury UK, 2013

Synopsis

Edmund White

About this title

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, Hotel de Dream. His nonfiction includes City Boy and other memoirs; The Flâneur, about Paris; and literary biographies and essays. White lives in New York and teaches at Princeton University.

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

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1408830272
• ISBN 13: 9781408830277
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 392