Pillow Talk

Edmund White’s ambitious and elegiac new novel, “The Farewell Symphony,” is a literary hybrid, a vivid and variegated book. Part confession, part memoir, part social and sexual history of the last three decades of gay life in America, the novel completes the trilogy White began with “A Boy’s Own Story,” the autobiographical coming-of-age novel he published in 1982 that introduced the unnamed narrator’s family, first friendships and early loves and broke off when the narrator was still in boarding school. “The Beautiful Room Is Empty” (1988) followed the narrator from the repressed and oppressive Midwest of his late adolescence to the gradually liberating experience of college and then to the unshackled milieu of downtown New York of the 1960s, where he began to come into his own sexually, creatively and intellectually. “The Beautiful Room” ended in 1969 with the Stonewall riots (“Our Bastille Day . . . “), an important historical moment in what would become the gay liberation movement, but it left the narrator--”This big lummox I didn’t really know, myself”--in many ways still incomplete. “The Farewell Symphony” is, among other things, about completion: of the narrator’s self-portrait as well as of the many portraits of the people, places and behaviors he has observed closely for more than 30 years.

This intricate novel is not unlike a silver ball that hangs above a dance floor and rotates slowly on a fixed axis, reflecting the action below in a mosaic of differently angled mirrors. White’s narrator is the axis, at once removed from much of the action of the book, speaking to us from faraway, perspective-restoring Paris, and at the same time situated at its very center, inhabiting or perceiving nearly every scene. Mosaic is his unmistakable technique: In constructing this novel, White has abandoned the framework of linear plot in favor of piecing together sharply realized individual stories or installments in the narrator’s ongoing, unfolding life. And rotation, too, is essential to his approach: Once a story is affixed to its surface, the ball turns to accommodate another story and another and another still, which after 400 pages results in a surprising accumulation of power and feeling. At the end, the beautiful room, though in fact emptied of many of its AIDS-stricken dancers, is in another sense rich and peopled and full: of individual histories, of couplings and confidences and, above all, of lives conjured from the fog of the past, irradiated with the light of language and preserved with almost reliquary devotion.

“The Farewell Symphony” differs in tone and technique from the earlier two books, whose narrative voice feels somewhat more detached and self-conscious. In “A Boy’s Own Story,” for example, the Midwest setting, though carefully depicted, is never specified. This lends a dream-like quality to the action that may be appropriate to childhood but also gives the proceedings an arty air. The narrator in this first volume teases the reader with the occasional direct address (“I say all this by way of hoping that the lies I’ve made up to get from one poor truth to another may mean something”), an approach that begins to fade in “The Beautiful Room.” Late in this second novel, as if feeling his way toward his ultimate methodology, the narrator characterizes a novel as a “clumsy but sometimes funny conversation between two people in which one of them is doing all the talking.” This conversation, mostly uninflected by literary gamesmanship, wholly uninhibited and urgent in its drive toward exhaustiveness, becomes the modus operandi of “The Farewell Symphony.” It is as if the author’s voice and language have been loosed at last.

The narrator’s lack of name, which felt somewhat coy in the earlier novels, works to better effect here. Implicitly he seeds in the reader’s mind the inevitable speculation as to whether the narrator and the author, who share so many characteristics, are the same person, but he does not linger excessively over the issue. Having no name allows the narrator to shape change: Sometimes he is a disembodied consciousness whispering in our ear; sometimes he is a listener, passing on the stories he’s heard; sometimes he is a body exhibiting itself openly. The narrator has no use for Philip Roth-like dances with his doppelganger. He has more pressing matters on his mind. It is the mid-1990s, and he (like the author) has been seropositive for more than a decade. Many of his friends and lovers are dead or dying. He recognizes that when he was young, he led an unsatisfactory life “thinking it was only a dry run for a better future,” but these rehearsals have “turned out to be the only performances I would know and now I embrace the memories.” This embracing of memories provides the substance of the narrator’s long one-sided conversation with the reader.

Who is his man and what is his voice like? When we are introduced to the narrator at the beginning of “The Farewell Symphony,” he is in the autumn of his life. Brice, his most recent long-term lover, has died of AIDS, and he is laying flowers before his ashes at Pere Lachaise. The narrator is white-haired now, heavy, sleepy, seasoned. His visit to the fabled Parisian cemetery triggers a reminiscence of his first trip to the city, where he became ill with hepatitis. The illness sends him back to New York, where he reviews the first 30 years of his life and presents the reader with its informing themes: sex (or sexuality), friendship and writing. The narrator tells us that he had, at this point, written five unpublished novels while working full-time at a national magazine. He’d seen two psychiatrists but had neither “gone straight, as I’d hoped, nor accepted my homosexuality, as I’d feared.” And while he’d had sex with his first thousand men, he was still “longing for the thousand and first knight whom at last I would marry.” His tone in this summary is typical: honest, unsentimental, never self-improving, more concerned with inspection than introspection.

Sex preoccupies the narrator greatly, and it is a fundamental component of both his self-portrait and the portrait he draws of the gay men of his generation. The narrator came of age in the Midwest of the 1950s, a place and a time where (White tells us in “The Beautiful Room”) the three most heinous crimes known to man were communism, heroin addiction and homosexuality. Something of the severity of this judgment dwells within the narrator to the end and may strike White’s younger readers as unduly harsh: Although the stance is appropriate to the period, the narrator never moves beyond it, even as the world around him begins to. Still, in this, as in other things, the narrator is comfortingly contradictory--comfortingly because it speaks to the humanness and unblinkered authenticity with which he presents himself. At one point, his sexuality is an “aberration, a disease,” yet later he says, “We thought having sex was a positive good, the more the better.” After cataloging many dozens of his thousand--eventually thousands--of partners, he observes, “I’d never considered sex to be an appetite, certainly nothing I needed on a regular basis,” whereas earlier he speaks of needing his “fix.” These paradoxical explications of his behavior are offered almost in passing; the narrator’s goal is less psychological than sociological or (alternately) Proustian: Every grain of experience, every memory, is to be shielded from the scattering winds of forgetting.

His sex life is endlessly varied and at times almost overwhelming to follow. Many positions and predilections are anatomized, sometimes from a coolly clinical remove, sometimes with lyrically sensual tendresse. Eventually the narrator’s personal sexual pageant merges with the wider sexual parade of his contemporaries, who constituted a generation that, he explains, “equated sexual freedom with freedom itself.” Both narrator and reader become aware of the remarkably compressed transformation that takes place during this period of gay life: “I thought that never had a group been placed on such a rapid cycle--oppressed in the ‘50s, freed in the ‘60s, exalted in the ‘70s and wiped out in the ‘80s.” This, in summary, is the cumulative subject of White’s trilogy.

Or one of them. “Early on I’d learned . . . to characterize and seduce the people around me,” the narrator remarks at one point and, indeed, characterizing the people in his life is the narrator’s other great preoccupation. Sometimes seduction and characterization go together: After nearly every sexual encounter, the narrator leaves us with a biographical sketch of his partner, a sort of “Decameron” of pillow talk. Other portraits (often of women) may have a sexual component but usually grow out of different connections, while others still originate from the narrator’s family, to whom he returns again and again, reconsidering his father, mother and sister after other aspects of his life have interceded. The narrator’s family members age, grow ill and recover, have breakdowns and heal, and stubbornly and movingly remake themselves. The result is an encyclopedic accumulation of detail, advancing perspective and hard-won compassion.

This arc, as manifested in the narrator’s family and in his more enduring relationships, most notably with his lovers Sean and Kevin and his lifelong friend Joshua, supplies “The Farewell Symphony” with its own kind of plot; also advancing the story is the narrator’s evolution as a writer. He eventually finds a mentor, Max Richards, an older gay author who introduces him to a whole new world of ideas and intellectuals. “Isn’t the duty of literature precisely the depiction of even the most exotic and depraved corners of human experience?” Richards asks, inadvertently anticipating aspects of the novel we hold in our hands. He goes on to suggest revisions to the best of the narrator’s unpublished novels and helps see them into print.

In one of the most rounded roman a clef-like portraits in the novel, Eddie, a rich and famous poet who bears a strong resemblance to James Merrill, provides the narrator with an education in literature and friendship alike. When we first meet him, Eddie is dismissive of the narrator, but later, after the mirrored ball turns once again, he emerges as generous with his money, intelligence and friendship. Eddie (his name, a variation on Edmund, suggests elements of self-portraiture in this portrait as well) also provokes one of the narrator’s more incisive asides about his profession: “Proust had been right when he’d said that great artists make the best friends, for they alone are at once sympathetic to the life around them and sufficiently detached from it to see it.”

In fiction, as in life, the interplay between sympathy and detachment is a tricky business. For the most part, White negotiates this relationship with great finesse: His voice modulates gracefully between the specific and the general, the emotive and the analytical; it is textured and rich, an ever-replenishing reservoir of fresh images and elegant phrasing. Nevertheless, White does choose to deprive his readers--and his novel--of the one key moment of reciprocity that this multicolored conversation is inexorably leading to: the story of his relationship with Brice, “the first man I’d ever loved at the same time he loved me.”

The choice is conscious. The narrator warns us at the beginning of the book that “even writers, those professional exhibitionists, have their moments of reticence”; as his spent and sorrowed voice winds down, he decides that his affair with Brice is the one story he can’t tell, “[n]either its happy beginning nor its tragic end.” By this point, though, the reader has entered into his own arcing relationship with the narrator, and we grieve for him--and, in a way, for the reading experience itself. For surely it is not only the expectation of a more conventional narrative that makes us want to see the narrator achieve precisely the connection he has been questing for during this long hard journey.

“The Farewell Symphony” takes its title from Haydn’s masterwork of the same name, in whose last movement the musicians get up to leave the stage one by one, extinguishing their candles as they go, until just a single violinist is playing. White’s violin may play alone now, but we now know that it was joined, for a time, in a transformative duet. It is a small caveat to this compelling book to say that we would like to have heard a portion of that music too.