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Some oldies but goodies this month (one from each side of the Atlantic), plus the latest from Edmund White to finish off with. Jack Jack is your typical American teenager, trying to grow up to be a normal, well-adjusted adult, but it is hard coping with the problems of adolescence when your parents get divorced and your best friend is fairly weird, and when you find out your father is gay (hence the divorce), then things become even more interesting. Jack is a marvellous story, where we see the world, and the incomprehensible actions of adults, through the eyes of poor bewildered Jack as he stumbles from one adolescent crisis to another. As Jack comes to terms with the broader concept of "family" that is now required of him, we come to love Jack and his extended family and friends. A very funny, but also very serious book, about families, gay parents and growing up in suburbia.
Lot's Wife Peggy and Henry are two forgotten oldies, growing defiantly older in a nursing home run by a parsimonious, authoritarian administrator. Driven together by their loneliness and rebellion against petty authority, they decide to marry, a decision viewed as bizarre by some. But they are no strangers to relationships that society may not find acceptable, both having had a gay relationship in the past. As they struggle to achieve acceptance for their marriage plans, they live half in the unhappy present, and half in their remembrances of the bleak years of WWII in England. They each become a replacement for the other's lost love, even though the genders are wrong, and even the wicked witch administrator is forced to become at least a bit human as she recreates her own reality to cope with her own finally realised loneliness. Not a happy book by any stretch of the imagination, but a beautifully told story.
The Farewell Symphony Released to very mixed reviews in September, The Farewell Symphony is the final volume in the autobiographical trilogy that began with A Boy's Own Story and continued with The Beautiful Room Is Empty. It has been dismissed by some as shameless sexual bragging, but praised by others for documenting the turbulent years of gay life before and after AIDS and celebrating life and love not just sex. White himself claims that he was trying to avoid "Little Nell" stuff and "AIDS kitsch", he didn't want to write a "worthy" book, but a readable one, and the roller-coaster ride of sex, sex, sex and emotion seems to have hit the mark with more people than it has missed with. I loved A Boys Own Story, and thought The Beautiful Room is Empty was OK, so The Farewell Symphony is at the top of my to-be-read list at present.
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