The Unpunished Vice

December 11, 2017
In this mélange of essay and memoir, author White (Our Young Man) reflects on the books and people that helped shape his remarkable literary life. In 2014, while recovering from a heart attack, he found that the seemingly impossible had happened: he didn’t feel like reading. This temporary aversion led him to examine his artistic motivations and to reexamine his transformation from a marginalized Midwestern kid into an icon of gay literature. In a conversational tone that blends affirmation and elegy, White escorts readers through an impressive range of interests and experiences—restroom cruising at 14, masterpieces of the Japanese novel (including works by Tanizaki and Kawabata), and the vanished highbrow cultures of New York City and Paris. Much of the text has been cobbled together from previously published essays, which at times undermines narrative unity. Given this ad-hoc structure, it’s hardly a surprise that the quality varies widely between sections, with a particularly flimsy chapter devoted to excessive praise of White’s famous novelist friends. Yet even at his most rambling, White’s erudition and charm are everywhere present. At its best, this collection is like a heartfelt conversation with friends over a bottle of wine.

Starred review from March 15, 2018
The celebrated author takes us through the many shades of literature."Reading is at once a lonely and an intensely social act," writes White (Creative Writing/Princeton Univ.; Our Young Man, 2016, etc.) at the beginning of his latest work of nonfiction. "The writer becomes your ideal companion--interesting, worldly, compassionate, energetic--but only if you stick with him or her for a while, long enough to throw off the chill of isolation and to hear the intelligent voice murmuring in your ear." Here, the author intimately whispers the literary twists and turns that have shaped his life into his attentive readers' ears. In exploring the books that have defined both his adolescence and adulthood, White dives into the various states of mind that acted as geneses for many of his novels and that elicited significant instances of self-realization. "When we're young and impressionable, we're led to embrace the books our first lovers love," he writes. Though there was only one first love, his college peer Charles Burch, White had many other loves that helped develop his literary persona. This is the central premise of the book. What lies at the junction of love, literature, and writing? What stories define us, and how do we define stories? Taking his readers from Alexander Trocchi to Joyce Carol Oates to Roland Barthes to Leo Tolstoy, White's repertoire is impressive; refreshingly, it's never pretentious. White's prose oozes mysticism and melancholy, the kind of melancholy that makes readers sigh with wonder and hope. "We like writers who can see the world around them," he writes, "who don't attribute impossible motives or responses to their characters, who can keep a balance between action and introspection, whose style is relaxed and flowing and conversational." Throughout, White's reflections are just as lucid as they are fascinating and just as compelling as they are bountiful.A literary delicacy with more takeaways than one can count.

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April 15, 2018
If we are writers, we read to learn our craft. So begins White's (Inside a Pearl, 2014) entertaining new memoir about his reading life and how it has shaped his writing. White recalls his first job, age 22, as a writer for Time-Life Books, in which he wrote on hundreds of subjects, a perfect position for someone with such a curious mind. He writes about his ambivalent feeling about his homosexuality, fearing that it would not only stigmatize him as a person but also restrict his literary career. Indeed, feelings of self-contempt come up more than once here. He discusses his favorite book?Nabokov's Lolita?before admitting that Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye was the first book he read that was about people like himself, and his friends, the misfits and outcasts of the world. But the greatest novel of all time, in his estimation, is Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, which he has read 10 times, modestly admitting, though I'm none the wiser for it. A generous, lovely book about the profound effect of reading on a versatile and influential writer.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

Starred review from June 15, 2018

In this blend of memoir and literary criticism, author White (A Boy's Own Story; Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris) writes about his lifelong love of reading. In the book's postface, he relates being chastised as a young child for not yet having learned to read, a skill he equated with freedom. Using his life and experiences, the author creates a literary memoir about this "lonely and intensely sociable act." His tastes are eclectic and wide ranging; he argues that Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina is "the greatest novel in all literature," placing this and other works within the context of his own life and the time and place in which the book was published. VERDICT A lovely and thoughtful memoir about reading, books, and life. [See Prepub Alert, 1/8/18.]--Pam Kingsbury, Univ. of North Alabama, Florence

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