Jack Holmes and His Friend - Softcover

White, Edmund

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1408815176 ISBN 13: 9781408815175

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012

Synopsis

Many straight men and gay men are best friends, but if the phenomenon is an urban commonplace it has never been treated before as the focus of a major novel. Jack Holmes is in love, but the man he loves never shares his bed. The other men Jack sleeps with never last long and he dallies with several women. He sees a shrink and practices extreme discretion about his gay adventures since the book begins in the 1960s, before gay liberation, and ends after the advent of AIDS in the 1980s. Jack's friend, Will Wright, comes from old stock, has aspirations to be a writer, and like Jack works on the Northern Review, a staid cultural quarterly. Will is shy and lonely-and Jack introduces him to the beautiful, brittle young woman he will marry. Over the years Will discovers his sensuality and almost destroys his marriage in doing so. Towards the end of the 1970s Jack's and Will's lives merge as they both become accomplished libertines. Jack Holmes and his Friend deploys Edmund White's wonderful perceptions of American society to dazzling effect, as character after character is delicately and colourfully rendered and one social milieu after another glows in the reader's mind. He is a connoisseur of the nuances of personality and mood, and here unveils his very human cast in all their radical individuality. New York itself is a principle character with its old society and its bohemians rich and poor, with its sleek European immigrants and its rough-and-tumble transplanted Midwesterners. With narrative daring and a gifted sense of the rueful submerged drama of life, the novel is a beautifully sculpted exploration of sexuality and sensibility.

About this title

Review:

`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. It's the story of two men and their unlikely friendship told without sentimentality, but containing within itself the history of a time and a place, New York in the second half of the 20th Century, that is entirely unforgettable and true. A top-shelf addition to the Edmund White canon'
--Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story

`Edmund White has written an incredibly moving novel, and the range of book, the indelible characters, the intelligence, the fresh prose studded with the most remarkable images and figurations, are no surprise from such a master. But still there is something new and wonderful here in White's approach, as though he has opened a previously unseen window in the haunting, funny and beautiful room he has occupied for years, and now it is flooded with even more light'
--Sim Lipsyte, author of The Ask

Book Description:

A moving, expertly-crafted novel from one of New York's most prolific and well-respected authors

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1408815176
• ISBN 13: 9781408815175
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400