White, Edmund. A Boy's Own Story (1982). New York: Vintage, 2000.

I Finished! this book four days ago, and have yet to come up with anything to say about it. White is like the foregrandfather of gay literature. He's like gay literature's Henry James, which is an awful comparison because James was himself maybe gay. At any rate, he's big time and I thought this novel was pretty bad. The following is bad, yes?

Like a heated square of pavement in an otherwise snowy sidewalk, the child burned through the adolescent and, luminous within the child, glowed this shifting cat's cradle of sensation, whether spiritual or physical I'm unable to say (158).

Or:

Just as each shell held to the ears roars with a different ocean timbre, each of these [boys'] bodies spoke to me with a different music (153).

Or:

The sun solemnly withdrew into its tent of cloud, disappointed with the world (123).

Isn't this stuff inexcusably bad and purple? But you should see the praise this book got and the high position it has in the 20th-C gay-male lit trad.

This, though, is very smart and insightful, and, I think, describes perfectly the situation felt viscerally by every closeted male teen in the history of the universe:

I didn't want [my gym teacher] to like men, just me, not even me as a man but me as discarnate ardor, pure willingness in his naive, manly, exquisitely untested arms (163).

This "novel" (it's pretty much a memoir, and, if published today, would be marketed as such) has much too few of these kinds of insights. Maybe the sequels are better.