Jack Holmes and His Friend by Edmund White

In the sometimes facetious, sometimes mutually uncomprehending, sometimes blazingly intelligent interplay of people of all sorts. adept at showing how relationships, especially in New York, city of ambition, are rarely disinterested-it's this last insight, in particular, that makes Jack's continued love for Will all the more poignant.' -'New York Observer''White's book embraces a classic love story, but it is much more: It offers something of a cultural history of gay life in New York in the closeted era before Stonewall. And the body never lies.' - Kate Christensen, 'New York Times Book Review''Surprising, funny and clever.White fixes his lens closely on, and the relationship's strange unevenness, ebbing and flowing from decade to decade, provides a feeling of authenticity and nuance to its investigation of gay-straight male friendship.'Jack Holmes' is filled with White's wonderful knack for metaphor.an absorbing and worthwhile read.' - Adam Eaglin, 'San Francisco Chronicle''In its best moments 'Jack Holmes 'allows Jack and Will to look in on one another's lives with curiosity and openness, engaging in pages-long dialogue about the nature of sex, love and friendship. Inhabiting a body could be said to be the essential truth of being, the animal experience shared by us all. For Jack Holmes and his friend, the realm of the body is the city they inhabit together, fellow libertines and explorers in a concrete place free of illusory deception. In chapter after chapter, White proves himself to be one of the finest practitioners of angst-ridden scene making about people in love with desire and desirous for real love.' -Alan Cheuse, NPR's 'All Things Considered'' 'Jack Holmes and His Friend' White delivers something rare.this novel, because of its relentlessly tight focus, its obsession with the physical aspects of sexuality, could be said to be lighter or shallower than White's earlier ones, but this is wrong. novelist White proves himself to be the finest practitioner of making explicit and deliciously accurate sentences about sexual coupling, straight and gay.

The result is not just ironic, it is an elegant study of the paradoxes and half-truths that emerge in long-standing friendships.'-'The New Yorker''Taken together, stories form a deep and powerful picture of love, desire, affection, rejection and despair in a great American city about to become writhen with AIDS. Switching between Jack's point of view and Will's, White shows each man as he perceives himself and as he is perceived by his friend. 'In tender prose, White does justice to the erotic potential of the story, with abundant and charged descriptions of sex.

Jack Holmes and His Friend by Edmund White