Edmund White
First published in 1980, Edmund White’s States of Desire, (recently republished in an expanded edition), is a late-’70s travelogue in which the author candidly describes gay men and gay life in places throughout the US. The book was written at a time when the gay-liberation movement was gaining momentum—helped in no small part by White’s frank and revealing work—and the AIDS crisis was still a few years away. Consequently, States of Desire offers a portrait of gay life in an era of transformation and questioning, of new possibilities and a sense of hope. But old attitudes of homophobia, repression, and The Pregnant Widow begins as a beautifully poised, patient comedy of manners, in the tradition of the nineteenth- century English novels that Martin Amis’s college-age hero, Keith Nearing, is reading; then, in the last third, the narrative skips ahead and thins out and speeds up and starts to destroy itself joyously, like one of Jean Tinguely’s self-wrecking sculptures—or like civilization itself in the twenty-first century.