Synopses & Reviews
When a respected older man clings to the values and mores of the liberated 1970s, when he pursues sex relentlessly and his reputation suffers, Chaos ensues. White explores different aspects of aging, romance, and sex, inviting his readers to come with him to Florida, the Greek Isles, and Turkey and into the chaotic gay demimonde of contemporary New York.
Synopsis
What happens when a life implodes? When a respected older man, a product of the liberated 1970s, is incapable of cleaning up his act in the twenty-first century? When he pursues sex with a rabidness his body and his reputation can no longer sustain? Chaos results, as the new novella by Edmund White demonstrates in pages that are by turn hilarious, sexy, and heartbreaking. Here, nostalgia has been banished. His funny, smart, but never wise hero is living on the edge in a Chelsea where everyone around him is thirty or forty years younger. This is not fiction devoted to the dim splendors and miseries of the past but rather to the unsettling, irresistible claims of the present. In two other long stories, "Give it Up for Billy" and "A Good Sport," White explores different aspects of aging, romance, and sex. Age has been one of the great taboos in gay culture, but here, White, as iconoclastic as ever, writes about maturity with the same precision and insight he brought to adolescence in A Boy's Own Story. In "Give it Up for Billy," a Princeton professor submits to the beauty--and explores the unexpected personal saga--of a white African private dancer. And in "A Good Sport." White shows an older man who has given up and retreated into a world of opium-powered daydreams about his youth in Istanbul. White has always been the ideal traveling companion, as he demonstrated in The Flaneur; now he invites the reader to come with him to Florida, the Greek Isles, and Turkey--and into the chaotic gay demimonde of contemporary New York.
About the Author
Edmund White is the author of some twenty books, including a biography of Jean Genet, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is best known for his trilogy of autobiographical novels
A Boys Own Story, The Beautiful Room is Empty and
The Farewell Symphony. He teaches writing at Princeton. An officer of the French order of Arts and Letters, White has written a short life of Marcel Proust. His most recent book is his memoir,
My Lives. He lives in New York.