A boy's own story White, Edmund

Originally published in 1982, and set in the 1950s, A Boy’s Own Story is a masterful exploration of sexual identity, a coming-of-age novel equally remarkable for its sexual candor, acerbic social commentary, and gorgeous prose. It achieved iconic status immediately after it first appeared, and from the vantage point of today it stands as a monument to the incipient gay consciousness not only in the novel’s unforgettable hero but in a generation of young gay men struggling to accept their own sexuality.

The novel’s unnamed narrator, now in his forties—the age of the author when the novel was written—recounts his adolescence as a precocious fourteen-year-old, deeply self-conscious and keenly aware of himself as an outsider. He experiences daily life as nothing more than an unending series of humiliations, from his inability to connect with the students in his school to his alienation from his eccentric parents and mean-spirited sister. Indeed, he feels safe and whole only when reading books or spending time in nature. “For I could thrive in the expressive, inhuman realm of nature or the expressive, human realm of books—both worlds so exalted, so guileless—but I felt imperiled by the hidden designs other people were drawing around me” (p. 92). As a child, he frequently escapes into a richly imaginative fantasy life, featuring three imaginary friends, all with fully developed and often conflicting personalities, but once he reaches his teenage years his fantasy life becomes increasingly sexualized. He dreams of an older man who will take him away to live a life of refinement—far from the crudeness and inanity of this world. “I entertained fancy ideas about elegant behavior and cuisine and friendship. . . . I wanted to run through the surf or speed off with a brilliant blond in a convertible or rhapsodize on a grand piano somewhere in Europe” (p. 24). Unfortunately, in this world he must settle for much, much less—the attentions of a neighborhood boy, a hustler, or the sex-crazed Ralph from summer camp.

The world he longs for and the world he lives in are so far apart that it seems impossible to bridge them. And so he begins a series of ill-fated attempts to “cure” himself of his homosexuality, which he regards as a “sickness” and about which feels deep shame. He goes out on an anxious date with the most popular girl in school, declares his love for her, and is roundly rejected. He convinces his aloof businessman father to send him to a private boy’s school and free him from the emasculating home environment he shares with mother and sister. And once at school, he further cajoles his father into funding his therapy with the hilariously narcissistic Dr. O’Reilly, who can hardly be bothered to listen to the boy, let alone cure him of his homosexual urges. None of these strategies work, of course, and the narrator is driven to a final, desperate betrayal, an act of vengeance against the unyielding adult world.

An unsurpassed exploration of the vexed intersection of sexual identity and social expectations, what is most extraordinary about A Boy’s Own Story—and what makes the book such a pleasure to read—is Edmund’s White pitch-perfect depiction of the narrator’s changing states of consciousness as he struggles to fit into or flee from the world around him. It is a struggle White would continue to explore in The Beautiful Room Is Empty and The Farewell Symphony, which form, along with A Boy’s Own Story, one of the most significant fictional trilogies of the twentieth century.