Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story—the first in his semiautobiographical trilogy, which includes The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988) and The Farewell Symphony (1997)—has become one of the classic “coming-out novels” that were a staple of emerging gay literature during the 1970s and ’80s. While this genre has come under fire for its often assimilationist politics (McRuer, 29, 33), White’s novel works within the genre’s conventions to show the agony inherent in discovering one’s identification with a stigmatized lifestyle. Editions printed after 1994 should include that year’s introduction by White, which tells the context around writing the novel and also helps to explain some of the artistic methods White employs.
Significantly, White gives very little to his nameless narrator in the way of personality, description, or individual identity. Critics occasionally compare his facelessness with Ralph Ellison’s invisible man. The quality even led one reviewer to suggest that this boy could be anyone and anyone could identify with him—even across gender lines (Lehmann-Haupt). The lack of specifics, however, does not end with the boy’s personality. Besides saying that he grew up in a smaller Midwestern city, the exact geographical setting of the novel remains mysterious throughout as well. The invisible qualities of both the narrator and his location have come under fire from Robert McRuer, who suggests that both work in racially discriminatory ways, but David Bergman presents an interesting defense. Bergman says that these narrative techniques code his race in ways that any reader can grasp while freeing White’s narrator to write less of his class and race positions and focus instead on the narrator’s more defining identity of an oppressed sexual orientation (Bergman, 2004, 71–72).
The thin veneer of plot throughout most of A Boy’s Own Story allows White to move his readers back and forth in time fairly effortlessly. The boy’s maturing happens as we see snapshots of him between the ages of seven and 15 and hear him recount the story of his sexual encounters after the age of 11. Many of his sexual encounters are with others close to his age and happen after his advances—the notable encounters with older people also happen after he has approached them. The disorienting quality of time fluidity almost confuses the fact that we read of the narrator’s sex with another boy at age 13 and that his sister, before age 12, reveals strong sadistic homoerotic tendencies. Yet neither of these moments will put too many readers off; the active practice of sex at his young age seems relatively harmless and essentially developmental for the narrator. The narrator’s encounters with the children of the wealthy, a young woman, and street hustlers help develop one of the strains of contemporary gay literature in general—the paradoxically freeing and entrapping qualities of promiscuity. Indeed, White begins the novel by having his narrator learn that two men could enjoy having sex at the same time, consequently setting the focus on the sexual acts of men as well as on the place of homosexual men in 1950s American culture.
The narrator’s most active and recurrent fantasies involve an older man taking him away to another world. White twists the standard damsel-in-distress theme by having the narrator dream primarily of his distant father taking him away. This idea returns at several different points in the novel; the narrator repeatedly wants to be the person pleasing his usually inaccessible father’s whims. Chronologically, this develops in the earliest portion of the novel directly following his parents’ divorce and father’s remarriage. His desire to possess his father’s love begins the most interesting theme of the story: The narrator wants his father—and his father’s status—for social advancement. We hear of his stepmother’s success in society and can interpret the narrator’s desire to supplant her in the roles of both wife and society woman.
Power motivates the narrator; his final bid for maturity involves exercising power over a bisexual man who teaches at the narrator’s private school. The narrator’s plot to tell school officials of the man’s marijuana stash and then have a sexual encounter with the man on the same day provides the final tension and the narrator’s ascendancy to adult or near-adult status. The betrayal of his teacher indicates an unfulfilled struggle to come to terms with homosexuality in ways that resist patriarchal structures, and thereby reveals the final compromise he makes to achieve maturity.
Sources
Bergman, David. Gaiety Transfigured: Gay Self-Representation in American Literature. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.
———. The Violet Hour: The Violet Quill and the Making of Gay Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. “Books of the Times,” New York Times, 17 December 1982, p. C37.
McRuer, Robert. The Queer Renaissance: Contemporary American Literature and the Reinvention of Lesbian and Gay Identities. New York: New York University Press, 1997.
Radel, Nicholas F. “Self as Other: The Politics of Identity in the Works of Edmund White.” In Queer Words, Queer Images: Communication and the Construction of Homosexuality, edited by R. Jeffrey Ringer. New York: New York University Press, 1994.
White, Edmund. A Boy’s Own Story. New York: Plume, 1994.
———. The Burning Library: Essays, edited by David Bergman. New York: Vintage, 1995.