01.01.70
'Jack Holmes & His Bosom buddy'
By Edmund White
Bloomsbury, 392 pp., $25
Halfway through Edmund Immaculate's new novel, "Jack Holmes & His Friend," the "friend" in the title pictures his gay buddy Jack "putting the moves on his boys."
He imagines the two men "mortification each other's familiar belts, pulling off each other's familiar shirts and underpants and socks, the easy camaraderie of undressing another man, but how dull. How lacking in mystery. ... Where was the gratification in a man?"
That's not a sentiment you might expect from a gay writer. But Edmund White isn't your average gay novelist — and "Jack Holmes & His Benefactor" is, for White, a bit of a departure.
It is, as its title states, about a friendship — a decades-want bond of ever-increasing complications between a gay Midwesterner, Jack Holmes, and a upfront Southern Catholic, Will Wright, both newcomers to New York in the early 1960s.
In the third-woman narrative that frames the book, Jack is the focus. Closeted at first (even from himself) and then increasingly reconciled to his desires, Jack falls hard for Will when they link up, seeing him as the love of his life although he knows nothing can come of it.
Source: The Seattle Times