A Boy's Own Story

I wasn’t too sure what to expect when it came to A Boy’s Own Story.  What I got certainly wasn’t what I thought it would be; not in a bad way or in a particularly good one, come to that.  It was just different.  I didn’t know a thing about Edmund White and there’s no actual blurb on the back of the book, it’s just praise comparing the thing to Catcher in the Rye and De Profundis.  Given that I’ve only read the former of these, I wasn’t in great stead for judging what a mash up of the two might be like.  I’m not exactly sure why this meant that I’d go into the thing with any preconceived notions, but there you go; I did.

The book tells the story of a gay teenage boy growing up in 1950s America.  It’s fairly episodic and non-linear, but in broad terms it starts when he’s fifteen and follows him through a couple years of high school. He has a lot of sex in this time.  Definitely more than you’d expect- especially given the legality of it at the time.  He’s at it with family friends, with prostitutes, with his teachers.  I always assumed that when teenage boys talk about the amount of sex they’ve had that they’re lying to impress their friends.  And there is an element of that; our narrator does make up shocking things to impress his psychiatrist- who seems more concerned about his own family issues than anything that his patient’s going through.  It’s fairly uncomfortable to read in places.  Not because it’s pornographic- it’s not- but just because everyone involved is so young.  There aren’t very many people who really want to read about twelve year-old boys shagging and I’m fairly comfortable passing a bit of judgement on those who do.

I think part of the reason that A Boy’s Own Story and White get away with all the underage sex is the tone of the book.  It vacillates between cold and clinical during the sex and the day to day and wonderfully wistful and longing when he’s talking about the men that he loves and why he loves men.  This has the effect of making some parts a great read and others deathly dull, as though the narrator could not be bothered to care about the happenings in his own life.  It also dulls any angst about being gay.   I expected more angst and there’s really very little and that that there is is dulled distance.  At one point the narrator refers to his sexuality as a choice, a decision that he is putting off making because he can’t have what he really wants and there’s a sense throughout the novel that he really believes this; that he is electing to be gay and he’s going to do it.  It’s so at odds with modern views, while remaining accepting that it’s jarring.

I’m not sure if, on the whole, I liked this book.  It has moments.  But there is so much tedium.  If the narrator of the story cannot be bothered with it then why should I?  It’s harsh to judge someone writing about their own life, but for great chunks of the book I was just reading a very dry autobiography of the childhood years of someone I knew nothing about.  And it didn’t incite me to read on.

I’m now on to Meryn Peake’s Titus Groan… it’s already inspired mixed feelings.