A kind man

Austin is middle-aged and unremarkable, but for the fact he is an American living in Paris and as a writer possesses some claims to glamour. He is also a newly single gay man and likeable enough to attract a select circle of young men and women drawn by his cooking and conversation. Not exactly a hunter, he finds himself in a gym, well aware that he is "twenty years older than everyone else". From the opening sentence Edmund White sets out to make this extraordinary novel not only the story of Austin, his sympathetic central character, but also of a society, one that is neither exclusively hetro nor homosexual - merely human and lost.

By now Austin had, we are told, "sort of given up on cruising. He wasn't young enough and what he had to offer - his accent, his charming if broken-down apartment, his interesting profession, his kindness - wasn't visible in a shower room." Interestingly it is this quality - kindness - which earns immense importance as the narrative develops and all from "two smiles and many glances, brilliant little flashes of curiosity. . . " The married man of the title is Julien, an awkward though good-looking and absentmindedly angry architect who meets Austin and, instead of becoming the love object as expected, quickly draws the slightly wary Austin into a relationship which is a romance based on equality. There is no battle of wills, no humiliation and a surprising absence of game playing and romantic lamentation. What should prove predictable is not. Again graced by White's highly individual and elegantly conversational prose style, The Married Man is typical White. Yet it is also different, and therein lies its subtle genius - and White's. It is as candid, as unsentimental, as humorous and as brutally realistic as any of his previous works. As ever, he is drawing on his personal experience, - much of his major fiction, with the exception of the fantastical Caracole, (1985) has been openly autobiographical - and written in the first person. This new novel, his seventh, is important for several reasons.

Firstly it follows that most unlikely masterpiece, The Farewell Symphony (1997), an elegaic epic which brought to a close the trilogy begun with A Boy's Own Story (1982) and continued with The Beautiful Room is Empty (1988). Biographer of Genet and Proust, White, through the beguiling power of his narrative voice with its tone of gentle candour, has managed to chronicle a world destroyed by its own desires. He is both campaigner and storyteller. No-one has written as openly, as graphically and as movingly about AIDS while remaining, or rather becoming, very much a part of mainstream literary fiction. If he possesses a polemical streak, he has never allowed it to cloud his fiction as art.

At more than 500 pages, and consisting largely of a series of eulogies to various men - lovers, friends and otherwise, including scornful objects of lust - who died victims to AIDS, The Farewell Symphony is as much testament to White's unique gifts as to a sexual community under threat. It is a work which simply compels the reader. Its achievement would prove intimidating for any writer to follow, particularly as its tone suggests a very final leave-taking. Few writers could sustain such a long novel dealing mainly with sex, often at its most casual and coldest. White can and does.

The Married Man is not only a worthy successor to The Farewell Symphony - it confirms that if White appears to have a narrow subject range, that of homosexual love, it is also as wide as life itself. Somewhat shorter than the previous book and less personal than the trilogy, the story of an ageing and hopeful man faced with a willing and troubled younger lover claiming to be on the verge of divorce would seem to be battling every known cliche. Yet White avoids the obvious through skillful characteristation, sure dialogue and a plot which moves from a comedy of manners to romance, to tragedy.

Austin is presented as "lazy, creaturely". Having acquired a specialist knowledge of 18th century French furniture as well as fluent French, he earns a living from journalism, writing on a variety of French-related subjects for US publications. "He dozed, drank tea, listened around the clock to a classical music station. He turned up the heat, staggered out to the corner restaurant for a buttery, sauced hot lunch, hurried home to receive the phone calls from New York that started coming in about four o'clock his time. The rapid, heavy-breathing, menacing American voices intimidated him with their humorlessness. . . He knew that behind these voices were perfectly made-up, stylishly starved women, who were at their desks twelve hours a day, firing friends and setting up "focus groups" (another new phrase) to terrorize their staff. Fortunately he was one of the few ready and always available English-speaking journalists stationed in Paris."

Julien, his aspiring lover is preoccupied, nervy, opinionated and utterly believable. Their early exchanges convey the tension and confusion of expectation. Meanwhile White the observer does not neglect to fill in the background of both men's lives. These men have opinions and views as well as memories. White is particularly convincing when dealing with Julien's vagueness, such as his ambivalence towards his wife. Probably more so than in any of his previous works, White has also worked at creating a large and diverse cast of minor characters who emerge as believable individuals.

Also significant, and certainly essential to The Married Man, is the fact that White has forsaken his familiar narrator figure and instead chooses a third-person voice. Whereas the White narrator in his previous books invaribly catches the reader by the warmth and ease of his voice, always matching his self-absorption with an undeniable interest, concern and feeling for others, this time this most autobiographical of writers creates and sustains a sense of distance as observer rather than participant.

Early in the narrative Julien becomes ill, about the same time it is revealed that Austin is HIV-positive. Much of the dynamics between the two men is due to their contrasting nationalities and levels of social sophistication. A long-time resident of Paris, White (who has returned to the US to teach at Princeton) understands French life very well and, though remaining very American, has also never quite lost that sense of viewing New York as not so much a different place as an alien planet.

From Paris they move to the US when Austin secures an academic post. This upheaval, including the difficulty of arranging legal entry for Julien, is well described. Back in the US, Austin is soon mourning his Parisian life. New tensions enter his relationship with Julien, through his illness as well as the still strong claims of Austin's former lover Peter. There is a great deal of travel, again vividly described, which includes a last long journey through Morocco with the dying Julien. Very few writers, if any, could have taken this story and kept it as free of sentiment, as full of feeling, as White has. True to his previous work, The Married Man is honest and compassionate, and the characteristation of Austin as a likeable survivor doomed to witness suffering and loss is but one of the elements consolidating the strange beauty of this sad story.

Eileen Battersby is a critic and Irish Times journalist