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Edmund White's fiction has always drawn on his own experience, from A Boy 's Own Story to The Beautiful Room Is Empty to The Farewell Symphony--indeed, The Married Man reworks a final section of that last, monumental elegy. It's impossible to imagine Austin Smith, ageing HIV-positive American expatriate in Paris, without seeing Edmund White, expatriate HIV-positive American author in Paris, exploring his "posthumous, post-diagnosis, foreign days". And, thanks to Stephen Barber 's recent biography, Edmund White: The Burning World, it's an easy enough job for the curious to make the more detailed connections. Yet White 's writing has never been lazily autobiographical and here, writing in the third person, he seems at even greater pains to distance himself from Austin, who is presented with no little comic irony. Partly, that comes with the territory of being an American in Paris: "Austin was a foreigner and what he did and said were thrown into relief". However, his foreignness, in turn, is a useful lens for viewing the US as an alien, horribly unintellectual, culture; some of the book 's finest moments come as Austin starts teaching in Providence, Rhode Island, painfully oblivious to the recent cultural shifts of his homeland, adrift and belligerent in a brave new world of political correctness and homeboys, unable to grasp that the simple fact of being a gay man does not necessarily make him a woman's best friend. The resultant distancing of author from hero makes for a far tauter, less self-indulgent writing--and a love story that is at times banal and irritating but never less than convincing and, at its climax, unbearably moving. White writes of "the tackiness of survival" that leads "inevitably" to forgetting and faithfulness; in The Married Man he has ensured that one great love story cannot be forgotten or betrayed.--Alan Stewart
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Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. In Edmund White's most moving novel yet, an American living in Paris finds his life transformed by an unexpected love affair. Austin Smith is pushing fifty, loveless and drifting, until one day he meets Julien, a much younger, married Frenchman. In the beginning, the lovers' only impediments are the comic clashes of culture, age, and temperament. Before long, however, the past begins to catch up with them. In a desperate quest to save health and happiness, they move from Venice to Key West, from Montreal in the snow to Providence in the rain. But it is amid the bleak, baking sands of the Sahara that their love is pushed to its ultimate crisis. Pushing 50, an American furniture scholar in Paris has an affair with a young and married French architect. In a desperate quest for health and happiness, the two men travel from Venice to Key West to Montreal to Providence. Finally, in the Sahara, their love is pushed to the ultimate crisis. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9780679781448
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