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City Boy

by Edmund White

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Overview
Readers reviews (5)

Product Details

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Publishing date: 29/09/2009
Language: English
ISBN-13: 9781596914025
ISBN: 1596914025

Synopsis

An irresistible literary treat: a memoir of the social and sexual lives of New York City’s cultural and intellectual in-crowd in the tumultuous 1970s, from acclaimed author Edmund White.
In the New Y ork of the 1970s, in the wake of Stonewall and in the midst of economic collapse, you might find the likes of Jasper Johns and William Burroughs at the next cocktail party, and you were as likely to be caught arguing Marx at the New York City Ballet as cruising for sex in the warehouses and parked trucks along the Hudson. This is the New York that Edmund White portrays in City Boy: a place of enormous intrigue and artistic tumult. Combining the no-holds-barred confession and yearning of A Boy’s Own Story with the easy erudition and sense of place of The Flaneur, this is the story of White’s years in 1970s New York, bouncing from intellectual encounters with Susan Sontag and Harold Brodkey to erotic entanglements downtown to the burgeoning gay scene of artists and writers. I t’s a moving, candid, brilliant portrait of a time and place, full of encounters with famous names and cultural icons.

An esteemed novelist and cultural critic, Edmund White is the author of many books, including the autobiographical novel A Boy’s Own Story; a previous memoir, My Lives; and most recently a biography of poet Arthur Rimbaud. White lives in New York City and teaches writing at Princeton University.

A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist

In the tumultuous 1970s, in the wake of Stonewall and in the midst of economic collapse, any culturally and intellectually curious New Yorker might encounter Jasper Johns and William Burroughs at a cocktail party, and one was just as likely to spend an evening arguing Marx at the New York City Ballet, as cruising for sex in the warehouses and parked trucks along the Hudson. This is the New York that Edmund White portrays in City Boy: a place of enormous intrigue and artistic activity.

Combining the no-holds-barred confession and yearning of A Boy’s Own Story with the easy erudition and sense of place of The Flaneur, this is the story of White’s years in 1970s New York, bouncing from intellectual encounters with Susan Sontag and Harold Brodkey to erotic entanglements downtown to the burgeoning gay scene of artists and writers. It’s a moving, candid, brilliant portrait of a time and place, full of encounters with famous names and cultural icons.

?[A] moving chronicle . . . that peacock’s tail, those stag’s antlers?they’re here, to be sure, but so are vulnerability, doubt, failure and long years toiling at the sort of cruddy day jobs that most literary writers know all too well . . . In City Boy, White is amusing and raucous as ever but he also lets the mask slip?his losses and struggles, as consequence, seems less sculpted, but more real . . . Some stories don’t need to be embellished to glow.”?The New York Times Book Review

"An open-throttled tour of New York City during the bad old days of the 1960s and early '70s . . . it's all here in exacting and eye-popping detail . . . There is a great deal of sex and gossip in City Boy, but it is also a minor-key account of Mr. White's coming of age as a writer . . . City Boy is Mr. White's second memoir in three years, and a great deal of his fiction has been autobiographical. You get the sense of a writer slowly peeling his life like an artichoke, letting only a few stray leaves go at a time . . . This one is salty and buttery, for sure. Mr. White's 'Oh, come on, guys' meekness has vanished into thin air."?The New York Times

"Chronicl[es] Gotham’s cultural highs and lows during those two heady and iconic decades . . .

fleshing out our notion of how vital a period the ’60s and ’70s were . . . Since White is a born raconteur, his gimlet-eyed anecdotes about celebrities of the era are as tangy as blood orange sorbet served after lobster Thermidor . . . [he] matches his talent for journalism with brilliant imagistic prose."?Gay City News

"City Boy is an amazing memoir of White’s hunger for literary fame?for publication even?and intellectual esteem in the superheated creative world of ’60s and ’70s New York. His sketches of writers and artists, including everyone from poets James Merrill and John Ashbery to artist Robert Wilson and editor Robert Gottlieb, are full of bon mots, sharply observed details, and great honesty about his own desires for love and esteem. City Boy vividly brings to life the sheer squalor of life in 1970s New York . . . A wonderful raconteur with a well-stocked fund of anecdotes and observations, White’s writings reveal much about alliances, alignments, and personalities from a vanished world that still echo strongly in our own."?This Week in New York

"[An] exuberant, thoughtful memoir. Arriving in 1962 and determined to be famous, [Edmund White] found a job in publishing and got to work on his dream. Away from the office, he dedicated his energy to meeting people (some famous, some not) and, of course, having sex with lots and lots of men. Ambition, amphetamines, neurosis and an era when New York vibrated with desire combined for heady times in his young life . . . White wrestled with self-acceptance as he pursued therapy to reorient himself for a (never-to-be) heterosexual marriage; he admits he was so consumed with internalized self-loathing that he didn't have a clear idea of how he looked. Others, however, did not miss the handsome, eager man in all his '60s and '70s glory, and he made friends easily. White's affectionate yet candid portraits of literary celebrities Richard Howard, Harold Brodkey and Susan Sontag celebrate those friendships, with the eminences coming across as quite distinct from their forbidding public personas, even lovable. White got around in less elevated circles too. He saw a lifetime of scandalous acting out that bubbles up in passing remarks like, 'When gay men say in their personals, 'No drama queens, please,' they are trying to avoid someone like Coleman.' Sparkling cameo appearances by the likes of Truman Capote, Robert Mapplethorpe and Fran Lebowitz expand the feeling that artistic Manhattan then was a very different place than it is today. All fun aside, the gadabout boulevardier at some point had to take a back seat to the fiercely ambitious emerging writer. White's vivid analysis of his artistic struggles and literary progress during these years is like a master class for other writers. As he notes, the years of uncertainty helped him develop and refine his themes, otherwise he 'would never have turned toward writing with a burning desire to confess, to understand, to justify myself in the eyes of others.' Many readers of his landmark novel, A Boy's Own Story, will sit up at attention when he links his goal of writing 'a modern tragedy in which there were two choices and both were bad' to Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen. That like-minded connection to Bowen also serves to explain his insistence that any truly satisfying work of literature must embrace a mysterious element of charm. Let it be known that White's memoir takes that lesson to heart and has charm to burn."?John McFarland, Shelf Awareness

"A graceful memoir of a decidedly ungraceful time in the life of New York City . . . A welcome portrait of a time and place long past, and much yearned for."?Kirkus Reviews

?A colorfully detailed remembrance . . . with his novelist’s brilliance in turns of phrase in evoking these places, [White] also recalls the many celebrated writers he encountered over the years in his slow climb to writerly success. A special invitation to a world gone by.”?Booklist

?Novelist and critic White weaves erotic encounters and long-ago literati into a vast tapestry of Manhattan memories . . . How he overcame setbacks and confronted his insecurities to eventually write 23 books makes for fascinating reading . . . White writes with a simple, fluid style, and beneath his patina of pain, a refreshing honesty emerges. This is a brilliant recreation of an era, rich in revels, revolutions and ?leather boys leading the human tidal wave.’”?Publishers Weekly

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A Poignant, Beautifully Written Novel.....
From Amazon

I just finished City Boy by Edmund White and I loved it. I was reading Patti Smith's Just Kids and White's book concurrently (two hardcover books at once - a rarity for someone who prides himself on a subscription to Vanity Fair ) and found that they offered views of a similar place and time - yet from very different perspectives. While City Boy portrays the literary side of 1960's /70's New York in depth, it is White's description of that now lost, pre-1981 NYC gay underworld that will resonate with readers of a certain generation who are fortunate to be alive today while having experienced it all first-hand.

Why do I keep reading this man's books?
From Amazon

The last year has found me fascinated by the New York of the 60's and 70's. I have read a number of novels and memoirs of this era and found once again that it is easy to get caught up in an era I was born too late to experience first hand. After I read this book, in 2 sittings, I found myself wondering how on earth anyone could make this era of history sound so utterly boring and dry. I am not surprised, actually. I have read a number of White's books and have always found them sterile and emotionless. More than anything, I find his writing to remind me of the worst kind of journalism. There is no investment in the material. Why did he love the men in this book? I have no idea. Why were these people his friends? No clue. With one or two exceptions, I found every recounting of his memories to be distant, removed and told with an odd formality. There is plenty of energy expended here to weave arcane literary references into the stories and descriptions. I was frequently reminded of his knowledge of French and Italian by the dropping of phrases he gleaned from his experiences abroad. Sadly, such efforts just cluttered the loose narrative and served only to remind me that the man has read a lot and traveled extensively. So what? It is the least interesting thing about him. Where he has been and what he has read is incidental. After reading this book, I have no lasting impressions about what it felt like to be in one of the most exciting places on earth during one of the most fertile artistic and cultural times in recent history. There is no soul in this book. No guts. No heart. I think it has finally broken me of reading his books. I was far more moved and educated by Patti Smith's recounting of the era, Just Kids. I felt like I had devoured a gourmet feast after I read it. City Boy made me feel like I had stared at a grainy photo of food in a long ago discarded magazine.

Too Much Name-Dropping, Not Enough Story
From Amazon

I received this book in November and tried to read it then but couldn't get through it. I picked it up twice more before finally finishing it, and after all that effort to read the book I'm a little disappointed. White spins an engaging story, mixing comic anecdotes with serious reflection on himself and his peers at a time of great change in their lives - but I just wasn't interested. An excessive amount of name dropping turned me off from the very beginning, and the rest of the book did little to change my impressions. I think White has a lot of interesting things to say, and overall is an insightful and talented writer - clearly, since he overcame the early writers' block he describes in the book to publish 23 books - but his prose here was clumsy, often repetitive and even gossipy in tone. I thought I would like that casual, 'have I got a story for you' feel - instead it made the book a difficult one for me to finish. I understand that White's life and writing have been vastly impacted by the time and place in which his adult life began - there were times, however, many times throughout the book, where entire paragraphs read like a roster of the literary and cultural icons of his time. Good for him, for meeting and observing all of those people. But was that all he had to write about?"

Prepare to be put to sleep!
From Amazon

Edmund White is a talented writer of fiction, but not biographies or autobiographies. This tale of his life does not resonate on paper. Although he provides snippets of his interactions with friends and celebrities, there is nothing to draw us in. It was a chore to read. With each page that I turned, I hoped that it would get better, but it never got there. This is great to read in bed, because it will put you to sleep.

Not White at his best
From Amazon

Edmund White is technically a very skilled writer and he has a wonderful vocabulary. Sentence by sentence this was interesting to read as each sentence is so well crafted. The problem, however, is that the stories White tells are, frankly, a bit dull. I was hoping for a grittier description of life in New York, or perhaps of the intellectual and emotional state of mind of the gay community in 1970's New York City. There are bits of this, but the book more often feels like a Who's Who list of the New York literary scene (White's corner of it, anyway).