Twilight's last gleaming

ATE in his sad, funny, elegiac new novel, The Farewell Symphony (Chatto & Windus, £16.99 in UK), Paris based American writer and anthologist Edmund White recalls a conversation he once had in Paris with the philosopher Michel Foucault. It was the time when AIDS, the silent, almost medieval plague, was being first identified as a threat to homosexuals. In the midst of telling Foucault about the disease, which had been dismissed in Paris as "an American phobia", White was interrupted by the Frenchman, who laughed at him, exclaiming: "Don't you realise how puritanical you're being? You've invented a disease aimed just at gays to punish them for having unnatural sex."

Foucault died of AIDS in 1984 and, as White reports, "an article on the front page of Liberation denied that he'd died of AIDS, as though it would be a calumny against France's leading philosopher to suggest he'd succumb to such an ignominious disease. Only very slowly did the truth emerge".

Few mainstream literary writers have been as campaigning on the issue of homosexuality as has Edmund White. He is a courageous chronicler; in his monumental biography of the French writer Jean Genet (1993), White, by choosing not to try to enter his subject's mind, succeeded in telling us a great deal about French intellectual life this century.

White's candour and elegant, conversational prose style have opened the door to an alien, shocking world most readers would find difficult to explore. No one charts personal humiliation, pain and sexual disappointment with such brutal honesty and yet as good naturedly as White. Resolutely American despite his long residence in France, he is the definitive outsider, but has never lost his sense of humour.

The Farewell Symphony is the final part of a remarkable, informal trilogy that began with A Boys's Own Story (1982) and continued in The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988). Caracole (1985), which now seems an interlude, is an epic fantasy of sorts, charting the coming of age of Gabriel, its teenage hero. It is 19th century in style, but politically and socially it is wholly contemporary.

Autobiographical fiction is clearly his medium. Although previously White appeared to be embarked on a personal odyssey, in the new book there is a sense of conclusion, of a gently fatalistic leave taking by a writer who remains scrupulously non sentimental. Although still writing from his experiences, White has accepted the role of witness. "Everything I'd lived through in the last five years had changed me - whitened my hair, made me a fat, sleepy old man, matured me, finally, but also emptied me out."

Despite the litany of sexual encounters - "I'd had sex with my first thousand men but that was a statistic that might sound like an achievement more to someone else than to me . . . I was longing for the thousand and first knight whom at last I would marry and with whom I'd live ever after in the strictest fidelity" - White is a bumbling romantic anxious, often desperate, utterly ambivalent, yet always likable. His intellectual meditations balance the obsessive concentration on sex and his growing literary ambitions.

As narrator he never loses our sympathy, largely because his self absorption is matched throughout by his interest, concern and feeling for the people he meets, either through encounters or in friendship. Among the more memorable portraits is that of his mother, with whom he had always had a topsy turvy relationship. "My mother called me to tell me that she was going to be operated on for breast cancer. `Honey, she said, I'm afraid this may be it.'" In "Reprise", a story from the collection Skinned Alive (1995), he writes: "She was in her 50s, fat, highly sexed and wildly optimistic (now I'm all those things, so I feel no hesitation in describing her in those terms)." Tough but buoyant, she is funny and brave, just like her son. As he notes in The Beautiful Room is Empty, "there is something so insipid about living that to do it at all requires heroism or stupidity, probably both".

His mother's death is vividly described, as is that of his father, the central presence of his life though, as White notes in A Boy's Own Story, emotionally remote, except from his dog. This time, the writer as his older self compares an unco operative current love object with dad: "... he was like my father, a cold, unfeeling man I longed to seduce".

He recalls that as a boy of thirteen he would sit at night outside his father's bedroom door. It one of many, many vigils, emotional as well as physical. White is a voyeur, whose voyeurism as a writer has always been oddly acceptable, because it is his only way of making sense of life.

Interestingly, although this third book takes over from The Beautiful Room is Empty, which is far more chilling in tone as well as more deliberately campaigning, almost documentary like at times, The Farewell Symphony returns to the tone of A Boy's Own Story, while continuing to chart the development of AIDS.

It is, of course, a book of physical description. Bodily perfection is central to White's responses. Many of these eulogies to men, former lovers as well as those who scorned him, acquire a tragic dimension as White, doomed both to witness and survive, reports on the death of beauty ravaged by the plague which stalks his friends, his lovers, his obsessions. The title itself is an epitaph, taken from Haydn's haunting orchestral work in which the musicians leave the stage one by on, leaving a lone violin still playing.

White remarks in passing, in one of many characteristically thoughtful observations in this bizarrely beautiful book: "To me, a work of art is a performance of a certain length that generates interest." This is a long, demanding book, graced by White's beguiling narrative voice and ability to reconstruct conversations as convincing dialogue. The honesty and humanity which it exudes makes it not only a work of art but also an important testament, a memorial to a world destroyed at its heart by its own desires.