Jack Holmes and His Friend: A Novel - Softcover

White, Edmund

3.59

1,071 ratings by Goodreads

9781608197255: Jack Holmes and His Friend: A Novel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1608197255 ISBN 13: 9781608197255

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2013

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A beautiful novel about an unconventional relationship, Jack Holmes and His Friend charts the friendship of Jack Holmes and Will Wright from their arrival in New York on the eve of the wild 60s, over two decades through the first stirrings of gay liberation and the catastrophe of AIDS. Jack is gay, Will is straight, and Jack will always be devoted to Will, but he will also introduce him to women and help him explore a more free heterosexuality. Edmund White explores identity, sexuality, society, and the sweep of history in this sensitive story of a complicated intimacy.

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About the Author:

Edmund White is the author of many novels, including A Boy's Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, The Farewell Symphony, and, most recently, Hotel de Dream. His nonfiction includes City Boy and other memoirs; The Flaneur, about Paris; and literary biographies and essays. White lives in New York and teaches at Princeton University.

Review:

"In tender prose, White does justice to the erotic potential of the story, with abundant and charged descriptions of sex. Switching between Jack's point of view and Will's, White shows each man as he perceives himself and as he is perceived by his friend. The result is not just ironic, it is an elegant study of the paradoxes and half-truths that emerge in long-standing friendships."--"The New Yorker""Taken together, [Jack's and Will's] stories form a deep and powerful picture of love, desire, affection, rejection and despair in a great American city about to become writhen with AIDS. In passage after passage... novelist White proves himself to be the finest practitioner of making explicit and deliciously accurate sentences about sexual coupling, straight and gay... In chapter after chapter, White proves himself to be one of the finest practitioners of angst-ridden scene making about people in love with desire and desirous for real love." --Alan Cheuse, NPR's "All Things Considered""[In] "Jack Holmes and His Friend" White delivers something rare...this novel, because of its relentlessly tight focus, its obsession with the physical aspects of sexuality, could be said to be lighter or shallower than White's earlier ones, but this is wrong. For Jack Holmes and his friend, the realm of the body is the city they inhabit together, fellow libertines and explorers in a concrete place free of illusory deception. Inhabiting a body could be said to be the essential truth of being, the animal experience shared by us all. And the body never lies." -- Kate Christensen, "New York Times Book Review""Surprising, funny and clever...White fixes his lens closely on [Jack and Will], and the relationship's strange unevenness, ebbing and flowing from decade to decade, provides a feeling of authenticity and nuance to its investigation of gay-straight male friendship..."Jack Holmes" is filled with White's wonderful knack for metaphor...an absorbing and worthwhile read." - Adam Eaglin, "San F

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