Jack Holmes and His Friend
Many straight men and gay men are best friends, but if the phenomenon is an urban commonplace it has never been treated before as the focus of a major novel. Jack Holmes is in love, but the man he loves never shares his bed. The other men Jack sleeps with never last long and he dallies with several women. He sees a shrink and practices extreme discretion about his gay adventures since the book begins in the 1960s, before gay liberation, and ends after the advent of AIDS in the 1980s. Jack's friend, Will Wright, comes from old stock, has aspirations to be a writer, and like Jack works on the Northern Review, a staid cultural quarterly. Will is shy and lonely-and Jack introduces him to the beautiful, brittle young woman he will marry. Over the years Will discovers his sensuality and almost destroys his marriage in doing so.
3.7 out of 5 based on 9 reviews
|
Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Fiction |
| Genre |
General Fiction |
| Format |
Hardcover |
| Pages |
400 |
| RRP |
£18.99 |
| Date of Publication |
January 2012 |
| ISBN |
978-1408805794 |
| Publisher |
Bloomsbury |
| |
Many straight men and gay men are best friends, but if the phenomenon is an urban commonplace it has never been treated before as the focus of a major novel. Jack Holmes is in love, but the man he loves never shares his bed. The other men Jack sleeps with never last long and he dallies with several women. He sees a shrink and practices extreme discretion about his gay adventures since the book begins in the 1960s, before gay liberation, and ends after the advent of AIDS in the 1980s. Jack's friend, Will Wright, comes from old stock, has aspirations to be a writer, and like Jack works on the Northern Review, a staid cultural quarterly. Will is shy and lonely-and Jack introduces him to the beautiful, brittle young woman he will marry. Over the years Will discovers his sensuality and almost destroys his marriage in doing so.
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Reviews
The Sunday Times
Edmund Gordon
"Jack Holmes and His Friend is an intimate and moving study of unrequited love, but also a comedy of sexual manners and a panoramic novel of society, all achieved in a rangy, full-throated prose … Jack Holmes and His Friend shows White at his very best: funny but melancholic, sensitive but sharp. "
01/01/2012
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The Independent
Boyd Tonkin
"If the mood and décor of the two men's jointed tales often recall other White novels, then the wit and daring of his prose dispels any hint of monotony. Nimble, naughty similes take flight on almost every page, from a German matron's bosoms "like warm dachshunds in constant motion" and gay groups jingling down New York streets "as if Santa's reindeer had been watered with champagne and gone plunging off course" to Will being pleasured by his mistress, "as if it were a doll's head that she was painting with her tongue, determined to cover every last centimetre". Whatever the gender combination, White's sex scenes have a humour, poignancy and poetry all their own."
06/01/2012
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The Spectator
Cressida Connolly
"Homosexual writers seem to be much better than straight ones at combining high literary style with vastly enjoyable descriptions of really filthy sex. Edmund White is a master of both. This novel is like one from the French 18th century, where passages of intricate social comedy alternate with carnal episodes of Baroque detail."
28/01/2012
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The New York Times
Kate Christensen
"“Jack Holmes and His Friend” contains plenty of dialogue, social delineations and scenery, but White is most interested in his two main characters as physical beings: the way they smell, the way they relate to their lovers, their sexual desires and habits, their genitalia, their thoughts about their own and each other’s bodies. Although at times this strategy can feel both too narrow and out of proportion, like a camera focused in immediate close-up and hazy at the edges, the cumulative effect is to afford the reader a deep physical knowledge of two reserved, cryptic men who in a conventional narrative most likely wouldn’t and couldn’t be known with this degree of immediacy ..."
27/01/2012
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The Evening Standard
Clare Harman
"White is too worldly a writer to force a moral ending on his horny heroes. His proper study is the human body, which he is brilliant at describing. "His stomach was as segmented as a bar of white chocolate," Jack muses of one lover. "His buttocks could have served as flotation devices" … Whether this novel makes you goggle or drool, it will make you smile with admiration too."
05/01/2012
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The Financial Times
Simon Schama
"There’s a sleek, close-shaved quality to White’s prose that in passages gives it the warm lubriciousness of early Updike and the dry martini sting of Cheever. And he is mercifully free of the lumbering pretensions, much in evidence these days, to write the Great American Novel."
16/01/2011
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The Guardian
Alex Clark
"Jack Holmes and His Friend presents us with more than one novel in its 400 pages: there is an almost philosophical meditation on the nature of romantic and erotic desire; a sharp period portrait, centred on 1960s New York; and a social history of sexuality over 30 years ... an impressive and thoroughly enjoyable novel, although far from a perfect one: its two female characters, debutante Alex and slutty Pia, resemble cardboard cutouts with convenient characteristics grafted on to them; White refers obliquely to Jack's disastrous childhood too much for us to ignore and too little for it to be of genuine interest; and the book ends in a stagey fashion that diminishes what has gone before."
20/01/2012
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The Observer
Henry Hitchings
"But there are times when the tartness and smartness recede. The novel exults in frank sexual chat, and some of it is unconvincing … Still, this is an urbane study of the geometry of gay-straight friendship. The subject has been explored by other contemporary writers, notably Michael Chabon, but White brings to it his customary glossy lyricism. He writes supple (albeit occasionally loose-limbed) prose about an age when gay love was often treated with either contempt or flippancy. The result is a book that is engaging and erotic, yet lacks the exuberance and sensuality of his best work – and a sense of urgency."
08/01/2012
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The Literary Review
Michael Arditti
"Although a straight man’s envy of a gay man’s sexual freedom, unconstrained by women’s emotional demands, is a rich seam for a novelist to explore, one cannot escape the feeling that the author is translating from a homosexual to a heterosexual context. Will’s relentless obsession with the gay world and its contrast to the straight world would be far more convincing the other way round ... If White’s exploration of sexual distinctions remains unsatisfying, his delineation of the social distinctions within his inner circle of characters is both fascinating and deft."
01/02/2012
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