The White Stuff

The homosexual subculture of the sixties that Edmund White chronicles in The Beautiful Room Is Empty (Knopf) already seems as remote as the Faubourg Saint-Germain of Proust's Marcel. Elegiac but not sentimental, knowing but not ironic, White's autobiographical novel—a continuation of A Boy's Own Story—follows the narrator out of Chicago into the promised land of New York. The author, who moved from New York to Paris four years ago, has also just published three stories (with four by Adam Mars-Jones) set in the present day. Darker Proof (New American Library) depicts gay life after AIDS, the calamity that changed the rules of the game as completely as the First World War shattered Proust's Belle Epoque.

White, now at work on a biography of Jean Genet, was intimidated by Paris before he moved there. "Instead," he says, "it's like Sleepy Hollow." Propelled in part by a desire to escape the pall of AIDS that had fallen over New York, White observes that "now it's caught up with me here"—but with a difference. "The French are more stoic and less hysterical," he says. "Americans expect life to be wonderful and to work out. The French don't."

ARTHUR LUBOW