The friend in the title of Edmund White’s new novel is a writer called Will Wright, a straight man with bad skin but a sterling pedigree. What little we learn about Will’s first novel – a metafictional romance about a man, the heiress he loves and an anthropomorphic cat – comes from Jack Holmes, a handsome, closeted editorial assistant who works with him at a literary quarterly in Manhattan. Jack is in love with Will, but his ardent affection and oversized penis fail to bend Will’s heterosexuality. Jack holds out hope that Will’s novel may betray affection for him, or at least an openness to sexual experimentation. Novelists, Jack believes, are under a professional obligation to be ‘odd’. And if Will’s novel turns out to be a hit and makes him a celebrity, he’ll need someone around to give him unconditional support. Who better than Jack? But then he reads a galley of Will’s book and his hopes are dashed. The novel is ‘sentimental horseshit’, ‘tepid’ and ‘gooey-sweet’, and he’s offended by the cartoon on the cover, an attempt to be ‘argotic and contemporary’, he thinks, that seems flimsy and ‘toothless’.

LRB 19 July 2012 | PDF Download