City Boy, by Edmund White

Edmund White's City Boy is a memoir of the author's growth as a writer during the 1970s, primarily in New York. It is full of anecdotes and stories about real people--of varying degrees of fame--like Robert Wilson, James Merrill, William Burroughs, and Harold Brodkey, among many, many others. All of the characterizations are fascinating, capturing the particular impact that this or that person had on the author. These passages are the kind that inspired me to track down some of the people that were new to me and thus discover something wonderful and unexpected; and on the other hand, to be reminded of old favorites now also seen in the new light of White's sensibility.

The description of Jasper Johns in Chapter 15, whose "house had the sort of simplicity that only money could buy" (214) is especially powerful. His description of Johns starts on an intimate, personal level and then opens into a discussion (one of many) about the differences between artists of the time who were publicly out (like White) and those that were closeted (like Johns, Sontag, and many others). This chapter especially exemplifies White's charm, and the mixture of his thoughtfulness, his awe for the people who inspired him, and (not least) his vanity. Like he does in most of the book, in this chapter he balances the nostalgic voyeurism of his past with a thoughtful criticism of the attitudes of his younger self.

The book is solidly interesting and rewarding--up until the last chapter, which seems rushed and awkward. White doesn't seem to know how to talk about Susan Sontag, and ends up shifting suddenly, through a discussion of the impact of AIDS on the 1970s New York scene, into a weaker, maudlin prose unlike anything that precedes it. The impulse to grieve rings true, but his writing is clearly more effective in remembering earlier, happier times than it is eulogizing the loss of them.