Edmund White’s new novel opens, somewhat improbably, in 2050. This imagined future, however, springs few surprises on the reader and is in fact almost identical to the present. Indeed, the leap forward in time is merely a narrative device, allowing a 70-year-old Sicilian aristocrat to reminisce about his affair 30 years earlier with the elderly Edmund White, now long dead and more or less forgotten as a writer. Ruggero Castelnuovo has subsequently married a much younger American woman, Constance. The couple have made a pact never to talk about their past lives, but they now decide to write their private ‘confessions’, and much of the book is taken up with these largely sexual memoirs, sections of which they read aloud to each other.
Ruggero is an unrepentant ‘happy narcissist’, very handsome, beautifully mannered and reliably aroused by those who worship his physical endowments. This becomes essential when, after numerous relationships with both men and women, recounted here at length and in considerable detail, he meets the obese, impotent and partially disabled White, ‘a fat, famous slug’ very far from his physical ideal.
Ruggero is initially drawn to White’s books — ‘You’re the great artist who moved me to tears with his writing and the truth of his words’ — but he then embarks on a physical relationship with the sexually abject (and married) author, the details of which will be familiar to readers of the notorious ‘My Masters’ chapter of White’s 2005 memoir My Lives. Despite White being ‘the love of his life’, Ruggero eventually abandons him for a younger man, behaviour that makes Constance live in fear of being abandoned in her turn.
As is often the case with White, the principal characters may be indefatigably horny, but they are also undeniably classy.
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