Our Young Man by Edmund White review – sparkling and steamy tale of a male model

A beautiful young man ascends the dizzy heights of the fashion world in White’s playful and profound 11th novel

Edmund White’s 11th novel seems, on the surface, to be a rewriting of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. A gorgeous young French model, Guy, arrives “from Paris to New York in the late 1970s when he was in his late 20s but passed as 19”. Throughout the novel, this agelessness – even when he is pushing 40, people take him to be at least 15 years younger – is an inescapable note, sounded over and over again. Even Guy, not the most intellectual character you’ll encounter in a novel, is aware of the literary allusion: towards the very end, in a rare moment of feeling sick of his “eternal” beauty, he thinks, “What if he were stripped of his looks, if he stabbed the grotesque painting in the attic?” But in a book as beguilingly treacherous and deceptive as Our Young Man, this referencing of Wilde seems a calculated indirection: impishly turning our attention towards the obvious, while subtler, weightier matters churn on elsewhere. I imagine White setting himself the challenge, “Is it possible to write a profound book set in the fashion world that will replicate the lightness of that world itself?” and then running triumphantly with it. Even the title has a doubleness to it: in the end, you will be asking yourself whether “our young man” is Guy, who is no longer young, or Kevin, Guy’s wholesome, serious, all‑American lover from Minnesota, who is in his early 20s when he graduates from Columbia in the final chapter of the novel.

Related: Edmund White: 'I try to be honest. If I lose someone's friendship, so what?'

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