New York Days, New York Nights by Stephen Brook

I have just done another tour of New York. It’s a city whose streets I have walked, whose life I have encountered, whose people I have known. But I have never been there. New York, Like Paris and London, is a city where writers switch on their professional noticing and recording. A good proportion of novelists seem to want to live there. It’s a city where journalists apparently never have to travel far for a story and where social commentators uncover endless lines of interest.

And in the early 1980s Stephen Brook, an English visitor, took his turn at plodding the streets, buttonholing the affluent and dabbling with low life in order to generate his book, New York Days, New York Nights. It was a task he took seriously. His mission covered the city’s politics, food, shopping, sexuality, power, social structure, ethnic relations, commerce, crime and apparently every other aspect of its existence, but with only scant regard for its history.

We learn how on Manhattan air space can be traded, how the city’s craving for constant change means that there is little sense of permanence. We visit late night bars and clubs, experience the gay-scene low-life at first hand, then at second hand and eventually at the level of the mutual anonymous grope. We visit jails, courts, police beats and other arresting areas. We talk to mayors, ex-mayors and would-be mayors. We feel debt and wealth in unequal measure. Stephen Brook appears not to want to leave any concrete block unturned.

But though Stephen Brook’s journey through New York’s unique experience is nothing less than encyclopedic, his experience seems to remain that of the outsider, the committed but still detached tourist. As each of the book’s many chapters runs to its close and another opens, we can almost hear the writer begin with, “And here’s another thing…” Well before the end we feel that the author is on a mission to collect in order to exhibit. In the end, we feel we have been on a city tour bus and listened to the commentary, but that we still have to walk the streets to begin the real experience.

But like all impressionistic descriptions of contemporary life, it becomes both less relevant and more interesting as it ages. It becomes irrelevant because its original concept is superseded, rendered mere whimsy by the passing of time. Its intention is to be contemporary, after all, and that quality is soon lost. But twenty-five years on, having been reminded that the city remains eager for constant change, it becomes fascinating to reflect on what has or might have changed.

In 2009, we have a financial crisis, rich man’s crime, an economy laden with unemployment and debt, recession and portent of doom and gloom. We also have celebrity, overt riches and conspicuous consumption alongside poverty, near-destitution, drug addiction and poor man’s crime. So what’s new? One major change is that during Stephen Brook’s journey, the existence of AIDS deserves mention, but little more. During visits to bath houses, the author experiences at first hand the workings, insertions, thrusts and suspended machinations of gay promiscuity – sorry, there is no other word – and the scenes he describes seem better fitted to a fantasy porn movie than any reality. A dimension we don’t feel in all of this is the contrast with attitudes that one would expect to be prevalent in middle America. Surely it is that contrast that illustrates the difference between New York and the rest of the country?

But New York Days, New York nights remains a rich and rewarding trip. (The city’s drug scene, but the way, is such an aspect of daily life that it deserves frequent but only passing comment.) Though the reader may occasionally tire of Stephen Brook’s lengthy trek through the city, it is an account that has endured and that still interests, perhaps because the place itself and its people remain interesting. View this book on amazon New York Days, New York Nights (Picador Books)

The Line Of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst

It can be no coincidence that Nick, the Oxford graduate who comes to stay, has the surname Guest. The Feddes invite him into their London home, Kensington Park Gardens, no less, because he has been a pal of their son, Toby, at university. Head of household, Gerald, is a Tory MP, elected by the good people of Barwick in Northamptonshire to represent their interests. It’s a county that always elects Tories, even when they close down the local steelworks, even when they candidates might appear unelectable.

Gerald, like everyone else in The Line Of Beauty, however, seems to be interested only in representing himself, a pursuit he achieves, again like everyone else, with partial competence. And then there’s Catherine, the Feddens’ unstable daughter who is on lithium, consistently referred to as librium within the family. Wani Ouradi, Antoine to officialdom, is the son of a Lord of Lebanese origin. The family owns a chain of supermarkets. Wani eventually has sufficient resources to buy up a piece of central London so that it can be redeveloped into premises to house a magazine venture destined from the start to sell no more than a copy or two. But then it will be something for Nick Guest to do with his spare time.

The characters in Nick Hollinghust’s book never really seem to be required to worry about the consequences of their actions. Leo is something different. He’s a council worker, and black, and not rich. An odd man out? He plays a significant role in the early part of the book, and later reappears when his family report he has dies of AIDS. The core of the book, it seems, is its sexuality. Nick Guest, along with several other characters, is gay. These people are not just homosexuals, however. They project an air of public display, men who wear their sexuality like a school tie. Perhaps they are not alone in that. So Nick has his fling with Leo. He has clearly flung with Toby and flings far and wide with Wani. The image of these rich young men having it off in smelly, locked lavs will live on after the book, but not for long. Nick regularly refers to Henry James, the quotations appearing like commentaries to the action.

Personally, the setting and characters reminded me more of Anthony Powell, who often inhabited similar social echelons. Powell’s characters can be every bit as devious, selfish, self-obsessed, fickle and ignorant as anyone in The Line Of Beauty. The difference, however, is that Powell’s upper crust speaks of misdemeanours in hushed tones. His is still an era of closets and his characters at least try to lock their skeletons therein. Alan Hollinghurst’s desirables, however, apparently want their skeletons in the shop window, mobile and, apparently, bent double before them.

And it’s not just the gay sex that’s traded, since cocaine and dope figure large as well, for the book inhabits the 1980s, the era when, we were told, wealth and riches flowed in the direction of merit, thus auto-confirming its sense of superiority and right. Eventually each of the intellectually muscled, self-seeking morons that populate The Line Of Beauty comes up against limitations. Some of these are personal, others beyond control. Scandal emerges and AIDS takes its toll of gay abandon. Nick’s guest status is questioned. He seems to take the blame for everyone else’s shortcomings. He seems to walk away saying, “Good while it lasted”, a motto that might have applied to the book, but it didn’t. The characters and their rarefied lives were eventually interesting, finally engaging.

Those things that Anthony Powell’s characters would have hidden are not only in the open but are flouted. And then, when comeuppance comes up, it seems that nothing will stick, nothing will damage any of them. And so this particular reader felt that their contribution to humanity might not reach the positive. Thus the story leaves a question. Is it voyeuristic, satirical, or merely horribly descriptive?

 View this book on amazon The Line of Beauty

A Boy’s Own Story by Edmund White

A reviewer of A Boy’s Own Story by Edmund White is presented with a number of problems, In the paraphrased words of one of the book’s characters, there may be a lot in the wash, but eventually not much to hang out, and this, by the end of the book, largely summed up what it had delivered. Be reassured, however, that the process of reading A Boy’s Own Story is a delight from start to finish. 

Edmund White’s style is quite beautiful, full of complex allusions, superb characterisation and, above all, masterful description. Every character springs to life off the page. If only collectively or individually they had more to offer… 

 A Boy’s Own Story is an adolescent’s discovery and realisation of his own homosexuality. The book promises a lot of sex and, sure enough, it both begins and ends with explicit encounters. Throughout the remainder, however, the sex seems to be more in the mind than in the experience. It appears that Edmund White’s adult recollection of his teenage dilemmas could have been subject to the embellishment of later reflection. Repeatedly the author stretches time to explore the detail of options whenever the boy of the title is presented with a dilemma. These were surely the voices of later years speaking through an ostensibly reconstructed, but surely imagined past. The boy always spoke eloquently about his choices, considered options in detail, but perhaps not convincingly. One of the more engaging aspects of coming of age sagas is how innocence is portrayed and how its conquest is engineered.

In A Boy’s Own Story one feels that Edmund White wants to deny that he was ever innocent, or at least suggest that he would ever admit it. And so a spark that could have lit up the glowing prose never quite ignited. When the book first appeared over twenty years ago, the fact that it did appear in its explicit form, apparently denying the guilt that oozes off every page, might itself have been worthy of note. Twenty years on it now reads as merely dated, but still it reads beautifully thanks to the author’s supreme skill with words and expression. The issues that might previously have rendered it remarkable have, however, long since cooled, so now the reader must approach the book either as it is, as an autobiography, or alternatively in historical terms.

The book, however, cannot sustain the latter approach. I will now certainly seek out other books by Edmund White, but in the case of A Boy’s Own Story I am tempted to conclude that though writers have to be self-obsessed, when that neurosis is turned completely inward, it raises new barriers that can exclude the reader. Hence the gloss. Hence the sheen of the whiter than white washing that proves to be just half a load.

View this book on amazon A Boy's Own Story (Picador Books)