Jack Holmes and His Friend

Jack Holmes is in love. The other men he takes to bed never last long, and it doesn't look as if there will ever be anyone else he falls in love with. Sadly for him, his feelings are not returned, at least not in the way he would like them to be. Will Wright comes from old stock, has aspirations to be a writer, and like Jack works on the Northern Review, where aspirations flourish. This is intense, literary sixties New York. Jack is living with three feisty girls from his college back in Michigan, and Will lives alone, writing his novel. As this brilliantly observed novel unfolds, the lives of Jack and Will will intertwine, and their loves come and go, and they will always be, at the very least, friends. Jack Holmes and his Friend deploys Edmund White's wonderful perceptions of American society to dazzling effect, as character after character is delicately and colourfully rendered and one social milieu after another glows in the reader's mind. He is a connoisseur of the nuances of personality and mood, and here unveils his very human cast in all their radical individuality. With fabulously a point insights, narrative daring and a gifted sense of the rueful rough and tumble of life, the novel is a beautifully sculpted exploration of sexuality and sensibility.