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Jack Holmes and His Friend
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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
'Edmund White is one of the three or four most virtuosic living writers of sentences in the English language' ----Dave Eggers
'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
'Edmund White is one of the three or four most virtuosic living writers of sentences in the English language' ----Dave Eggers
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
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
With love and sex comes great responsibility. Or at least that's the theory. For Jack and Will it's a lesson that neither learns well. Their friendship is the backbone of White's Jack Holmes and his Friend. Both characters profess attractive traits but neither is particularly attractive. What unfolds between them is a gripping satire of shabby bourgeois manners.
At first, White plays with expectation and gives us a coming out novel, with Jack Holmes as its goofy protagonist. Labouring under the weight of his genitalia, he frightens straight girls and attracts gay men in equal measure. You often feel that the only reason Jack ends up gay is because he gets a kick from the envious admiration of other less well-endowed boys. He takes chances, capitalises on trust, but Jack is thrillingly ordinary.
He falls head over heels for a similarly plain Will. Straight, urbane, but lacking glamour, Jack finds comfort in their easy repartee and drink-filled agenda. Having written a terrible novel, Will lapses into suburban marriage, while Jack stumbles into and then embraces promiscuity. In many ways there's nothing original about White's tale; like its characters, the narrative rejoices in mediocrity with the merest hint of Mad Men-style vermouth.
Within those prosaic bounds, however, White uncovers great poetry. Adjectivally sparse, his text is peppered with pin-point metaphors and rich observations of social and sexual interaction. The selfishness of his protagonists is always undercut by a mordant fascination with their myopia. Morality is fluid, but emotions remain the same and they flap and falter for our delight. There's great warmth too, but gay or straight, the rules are the same.
Although the larger part of the novel is resolutely pre-Gay, pre-Stonewall, pre-AIDS (though the latter two are never far away), White uses these supposedly simpler times to throw light on our own. Maybe they weren't the good old days. Rather than chastising propriety, White (like his character Will) offers an olive branch to puritanism and domestic comfort. What's the point of libertinage if it ends with the clap and an unknown plague? But only in the final pages do Jack and Will seem able to answer that question. Experience is a hard school, but it's gripping while you're in it and White's prose remains a poetic dream
At first, White plays with expectation and gives us a coming out novel, with Jack Holmes as its goofy protagonist. Labouring under the weight of his genitalia, he frightens straight girls and attracts gay men in equal measure. You often feel that the only reason Jack ends up gay is because he gets a kick from the envious admiration of other less well-endowed boys. He takes chances, capitalises on trust, but Jack is thrillingly ordinary.
He falls head over heels for a similarly plain Will. Straight, urbane, but lacking glamour, Jack finds comfort in their easy repartee and drink-filled agenda. Having written a terrible novel, Will lapses into suburban marriage, while Jack stumbles into and then embraces promiscuity. In many ways there's nothing original about White's tale; like its characters, the narrative rejoices in mediocrity with the merest hint of Mad Men-style vermouth.
Within those prosaic bounds, however, White uncovers great poetry. Adjectivally sparse, his text is peppered with pin-point metaphors and rich observations of social and sexual interaction. The selfishness of his protagonists is always undercut by a mordant fascination with their myopia. Morality is fluid, but emotions remain the same and they flap and falter for our delight. There's great warmth too, but gay or straight, the rules are the same.
Although the larger part of the novel is resolutely pre-Gay, pre-Stonewall, pre-AIDS (though the latter two are never far away), White uses these supposedly simpler times to throw light on our own. Maybe they weren't the good old days. Rather than chastising propriety, White (like his character Will) offers an olive branch to puritanism and domestic comfort. What's the point of libertinage if it ends with the clap and an unknown plague? But only in the final pages do Jack and Will seem able to answer that question. Experience is a hard school, but it's gripping while you're in it and White's prose remains a poetic dream
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Edmund White's new novel, "Jack Holmes and His Friend", is the story of a long-term friendship between two men, one straight and one gay. The story, told in two voices - one in the third person and the other's Jack's friend Will Wright. The story - set in New York City - moves forward in time from the late 1950's/early 1960's to the late 1970's/early 1980's and finally to the mid 1990's (Princess Diana is mentioned so I presume it's before her death).
Jack Holmes is a young man-on-the-move, attends the University of Michigan after spending years in a boarding school. The story of his home life is somewhat murky, but he appears not to have been close to his parents. At the time the reader meets Jack, he's in college and trying to figure out his sexual preferences. Is he straight? Is he gay? Or is he somewhere in the middle? He graduates from college and moves to New York to begin a career in publishing. He has friends and acquaintances, but in general he is somewhat aloof from his surroundings. At his first job - "The Northern Review" (meant to be "The Paris Review", I think) - he meets another young man, Will Wright, who has also come to New York City to seek his fame as a writer. Jack is gay and Will is straight and Jack has a life-long crush on Will.
But Jack introduces Will to another friend, Alexandra, and the two fall in love and marry and move to the suburbs. The friendship between Jack and Will enters a period of hibernation, which ends when the three meet up again. Will, by this time the father of two children with Alex, is bored with his life and is in the mood for a sexual dalliance. Jack "fixes" Will up with another friend, Pia, and she and Will begin an affair. The affair continues with Alex none the wiser, until Will decides to return to Alex and his children, but then moves out again to live the life of a bachelor. Meanwhile, Jack has been in and out of relationships and has not found a partner. This second part of the book ends in 1980 or so, with the term "Gay Related Immune Deficiency" (GRID) entering society's consciences and helping to end several decades of casual sexual behavior - again, both gay and straight.
Okay, there are a lot of sex scenes - gay and straight - in Edmund White's book. Most are quite graphic but none is gratuitous. A couple of months ago I read and reviewed for VINE a new novel by Richard Mason, "History of a Pleasure Seeker". I wrote that I found the sex scenes - and again there were many and both straight and gay - boring, for the most part. I look back at "History" and see a book written in a straight line with every now and again a graphic sex scene thrown in to make the book more interesting. In White's book, the sex scenes are part of the terrain of the plot. They are essential to the nuance of both the plot and characters and the book would be emptier without them.
Edmund White has written a wonderful novel about men and the way that friendship and longing make relationships - both sexual and non-sexual - provide ties between them. It's also a brilliant look at the places and times of the mid-to-late 20th century.
Jack Holmes is a young man-on-the-move, attends the University of Michigan after spending years in a boarding school. The story of his home life is somewhat murky, but he appears not to have been close to his parents. At the time the reader meets Jack, he's in college and trying to figure out his sexual preferences. Is he straight? Is he gay? Or is he somewhere in the middle? He graduates from college and moves to New York to begin a career in publishing. He has friends and acquaintances, but in general he is somewhat aloof from his surroundings. At his first job - "The Northern Review" (meant to be "The Paris Review", I think) - he meets another young man, Will Wright, who has also come to New York City to seek his fame as a writer. Jack is gay and Will is straight and Jack has a life-long crush on Will.
But Jack introduces Will to another friend, Alexandra, and the two fall in love and marry and move to the suburbs. The friendship between Jack and Will enters a period of hibernation, which ends when the three meet up again. Will, by this time the father of two children with Alex, is bored with his life and is in the mood for a sexual dalliance. Jack "fixes" Will up with another friend, Pia, and she and Will begin an affair. The affair continues with Alex none the wiser, until Will decides to return to Alex and his children, but then moves out again to live the life of a bachelor. Meanwhile, Jack has been in and out of relationships and has not found a partner. This second part of the book ends in 1980 or so, with the term "Gay Related Immune Deficiency" (GRID) entering society's consciences and helping to end several decades of casual sexual behavior - again, both gay and straight.
Okay, there are a lot of sex scenes - gay and straight - in Edmund White's book. Most are quite graphic but none is gratuitous. A couple of months ago I read and reviewed for VINE a new novel by Richard Mason, "History of a Pleasure Seeker". I wrote that I found the sex scenes - and again there were many and both straight and gay - boring, for the most part. I look back at "History" and see a book written in a straight line with every now and again a graphic sex scene thrown in to make the book more interesting. In White's book, the sex scenes are part of the terrain of the plot. They are essential to the nuance of both the plot and characters and the book would be emptier without them.
Edmund White has written a wonderful novel about men and the way that friendship and longing make relationships - both sexual and non-sexual - provide ties between them. It's also a brilliant look at the places and times of the mid-to-late 20th century.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
For me, this is White's best book in a while. It centres round two characters - Jack (gay) and Will (straight) and situates both of them evocatively in their 1960s/70s period in a fashionable New York. The other characters in the book are vivid and credible and White conjures up a whole world of a society at work, play and under all the pressures of human life. The thing I liked best, apart from White's genius with words, is the fact that both central characters are not extraordinary either as people or in their respective professions; yet their stories are compelling. I was also very taken with the fact that Jack does not have a great awakening to being gay; it just sort of happens. Many of us will have been there.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Among the best new books I've read in several years
White has written a superb book, a study of friendship between a gay man and his straight best friend, and those that circle around them. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Slinky
Breathtaking Narrative
Long time since I've read a novel with such breathtaking narrative. Jack is a beautifully written character, contrasted against the strangely lost Will and the brilliantly brittle... Read more
Published 2 months ago by Simon Wood
What do they do?
Any one seeking an answer to the much-posed question : what do heterosexuals actually do in bed? will find an answer in this funny and origtinal novel. Read more
Published 2 months ago by terence dooley
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