Jack Holmes and his Friend

Jack Holmes and His Friend
by Edmund White
(Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, £18.99)

Jack Holmes is a young magazine staffer in Sixties New York who becomes infatuated with his friend and colleague, Will, but understands early on that there is little chance of his feelings being returned. Will is straight and conventional, falls for and marries Jack's friend Alex, and retreats to the suburbs to raise children.

Even when, years later, Jack is able to come out to him, Will can't stop treating the whole subject of Jack's sexuality condescendingly: "Befriending a gay was like knowing a negro - you didn't want too many, but one was chic.".

As the years go by, Jack seems by far the more mature and stable character, for all the flux and fucks his lifestyle entails. Edmund White is famous for his sex scenes and this new novel is as full as ever of "swords", "scabbards" and the sweet smell of "boy mud". White also thoughtfully provides his hero with a penis of mammoth proportions that signals merrily to strangers in the street and causes men in the baths to "lean forward and literally drool".

Meanwhile, back in the heterosexual suburbs, married love is taking its toll on Will. His wife is clever and beautiful but the process of being housebroken is enfeebling and all that remains of his ambition to be a novelist are "ideas for stories", which he jots down semi-ironically. When he begins the first of many affairs, with a girl Jack has introduced him to, the men's friendship revives, and Jack's hopes along with it, though Jack eventually has to come to terms with the fact that Will is one of the few men he knows (and the only one he loves) who he'll never have sex with.

As the libertine Seventies give way to the Aids era, the question of which man's lifestyle is preferable becomes more complex, not just a matter of notches on the bedpost. "Men and women played for keeps, for babies, for money", Will thinks, while gay love seems barely "a real experience" at all. On the other side, Jack finds conventional romance disgusting and scorns the unnatural behaviour heterosexual men are required to display in order to get laid, the need "to bathe every horny move in romance, as if it were a gear shifting in a reservoir of oil".

White is too worldly a writer to force a moral ending on his horny heroes. His proper study is the human body, which he is brilliant at describing. "His stomach was as segmented as a bar of white chocolate," Jack muses of one lover. "His buttocks could have served as flotation devices." Elsewhere there are ribs "as visible as hands around a cup", thighs "ruched with cellulite" and jutting hip bones like "a desolate moonlit mesa ringing a desert". Whether this novel makes you goggle or drool, it will make you smile with admiration too.