The Married Man: A Novel [Paperback]

Edmund White (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 11, 2001

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Edmund White majored in sexual explicitness with his boldly autobiographical trilogy--A Boy's Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, and The Farewell Symphony. Now, explicitly as ever, he trains his unflinching eye on a new subject: a young man's death from AIDS. Austin is a fiftysomething American expat in Paris; Julien is a young married man he meets at the gym. Much to Austin's surprise, Julien calls him and soon they are sharing a bed and a life. The Married Man is White's Henry James novel: the first couple hundred pages show us a satirical portrait of young Julien as a stuffy Frenchman and a more elliptical portrait of Austin's apprehension of French culture through his lover. With Julien, "Austin was always learning things, not necessarily reasoned or researched information but rather all those thousands and thousands of brand names, turns of phrase, aversions and anecdotes that make up a culture as surely as do the moves in a child's game of hopscotch."

But White wants to take us all the way to the end of this relationship. Austin is HIV positive, and it soon becomes clear that Julien has AIDS. As Julien's health unravels, the two travel to Providence, to Key West, to Venice, to Rome, and ultimately to Morocco. The author coins a darkly appropriate phrase for this urge to move: he calls it "AIDS-restlessness." White, in fact, unveils a whole gallery of startling images as Julien nears death. Julien is "the bowler hat descending into the live volcano." Thin and brown and bearded, he looks "like the Ottoman Empire in a turn-of-the-century political cartoon." Though he can't read it, Julien acquires a copy of the Koran. "It was the perfect book for a weary, dying man--pious, incomprehensible pages to strum, an ink cloud of unknowing." White has found a language both magical and clinical to describe a horrible death. --Claire Dederer --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

In recent years, veteran novelist White (A Boy's Own Life; The Farewell Symphony) has turned to transatlantic themes (as in his biography of Genet). This Jamesian turn continues in the tale of Austin Smith, an expatriated scion of decayed Southern gentry, who lives on Ile Saint Louis, in Paris. Austin, an expert on 18th-century French furniture, is HIV positive but healthy when he becomes the lover of Julien, a married architect more than 20 years Austin's junior who is in the process of divorcing his wife. Throughout the first half of the novel, Austin maintains a protective distance, allowing him to see, all too clearly, Julien's pretensions and foibles. Austin keeps his HIV status secret from Julien until the latter gets the flu, which frightens Austin into a confession. When Austin gets a job teaching in Providence, R.I., he brings Julien with him. But a complication with Julien's visa, and Austin's restlessness, have the pair repeatedly flying back and forth between America and France. Meanwhile, Julien is diagnosed with AIDS, and his health disintegrates. The couple become a frustrated threesome when Austin feels responsible for a whiny, dim ex-lover named Peter, also dying of AIDS; Peter and Julien instantly detest each other. White's candor about the ways egotism is incompletely subsumed in love shows up in many wonderful touches; White illustrates perfectly, for example, the ways in which Austin's generosity to Julien and Peter, both much younger men, infantilizes them. His descriptions of Paris, Venice and Morocco are infused with an almost Matisse-like sensuality, but sometimes the author's evident intelligence seems wasted on his self-absorbed characters. In the perspicuity of White's art, however, even the vapid Julien, dying in Morocco, evokes pathos and terror, bestowing this love story with a classically tragic aura. BOMC featured selection; QPB selection; Reader's Subscription selection; to be featured in BOMC's new, as-yet-unnamed gay and lesbian book club. (June)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (September 11, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679781447
• ISBN-13: 978-0679781448
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.9 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (45 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #651,034 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Contemporary Parable, August 6, 2000

By 

Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Married Man

Edmund White's gifts as an author are indisputable. Whether he sweeps us along in schlastic AND entertaining bigoraphies(Genet and Proust), explores the tenderness of gay relationships ( The Beautiful Room is Empty, A Boy's Own Story, The Farewell Symphony, etc) or just simply writes a novel like his current "The Married Man", he continues to affirm his gifts of powerful imagery, unique observation of the mundane, and just plain story telling. But I find this current book more than the sum of his gifts; I think we have a powerful parable here that addresses the vulnerability and indomitabilty of the human spirit in times of profound stress. Others have accomplished this in writing about the Great Plague of the Middle Ages, the Holocoaust of the last centtury, the countless wars that have produced some of our best poets ( Wilfrid Owen, Walt Whitman, WH Auden, Siegfried Sassoon, etc....). White draws upon the blight of the AIDS epidemic and its smoldering aftermath to place his characters at the stake and find redemption. This is a splendid love story (stories) that keeps us wondering about the bizarre reasons we choose our "soulmates", our lovers, until the final chapters.

A Married Man is more about how we elect to let the world know us, of how we hide who we are - at times even from ourselves. The inevitable disasters that accompany living with a mask are not condemned here, but whispered as an argument for how we survive despite our attempts to be self sufficient. If there is an overlying message in White's opus (and there, in truth, are many in this wise novel!) it is that compassion is our antidote to the inevitablity of death no matter what course our life takes.

Whether we have been care givers or care receivers during this time of AIDS, this book will touch even the flintiest reader.

29 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars love in its undisguised state, September 23, 2000

By 

Bryan Scott (Tucson, AZ) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Married Man

"The Married Man" is Edmund White's finest. It's moving, lyrical (as his novels always are), passionate--and even has a plot (not to say I didn't enjoy his books that seemed to lack a plot). Never one to avoid or sugar-coat life's realities, in this novel White explores the challenges of a sero-discordant couple, the problems encountered when a former lover and a current one can't stand each other, and the issues that face couples of divergent ages, incomes, national origins, and native tongues. Anyone who's ever been in love knows that a romance is built on details, but White focuses on the details that matter: a nickname, a glance, how friends view the beloved, how anger or indifference or frustration affect the relationship. White's characters are never one-dimensional, but finely nuanced, alive and seared into memory.

In my opinion, no one writes place descriptions as vividly as White: One can almost imagine oneself at the café in Paris alongside his characters, listening to the haughty waiters spewing French, smelling the ubiquitous cigarette smoke, tasting the heavenly flavors of paté, a fine Sauternes, a delicate pastry. Winter in Providence never seemed so bleak or Key West so relentlessly sunny. And few writers can pack so much eroticism into one sentence (page 131 in case you want to check).

I was struck by the similarities between White's protagonist couple Austin and Julien and his own life with his former lover Hubert Sorin (as detailed in their co-authored book "Our Paris"). Both Julien and Hubert were French, similar in age, former architects, and each gave up his wife, his job, and his country to move to the States with his leading man. Austin's and Julien's trip to Morocco paralleled White's and Sorin's final trip; even their beloved basset hounds played a starring role (Ajax in "The Married Man"; Fred in real life). These similarities made the book even more moving as I realized how heartwrenching it must have been for White to relive so many memories.

This novel is by turns provocative, funny, maddening and heartbreaking. White delves deeper into human emotion and motivation than any writer I know of. What he reveals is not always pleasant or expected, but when you put down one of his novels--especially this one--you know you've been touched to the core.

28 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very poignant -- and just as well written as "Symphony", May 31, 2000

By 

"jdtx" - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Married Man

I was just as transfixed by "The Married Man" as I was by "The Farewell Symphony," Edmumd White's previous novel. Although the two books have much in common, the major difference is that while "Symphony" is a decades-long account of White's life, "The Married Man" covers a briefer period, focusing closely upon his relationship with the French lover he met while living in Paris (who was married when White met him, hence the title).

When the main character (let's call him "White") meets the French man, Julien, who will become his lover, we're amused at how White can be so attracted to this quirky architect in his shabby lime-green coat. White likes to dwell on telling details, and his ability to describe these details so perfectly is what makes him a writer of such genius. He depicts Julien with affectionate satire, describing the architect's shabby clothing with the same relish that he describes what he loves about him -- from Julien's handsome looks, his child-like joy in traveling and painting and walking their pet dog Ajax, to the earnestness with which he spins tall tales about his "aristocratic" family. The novel becomes much darker as Julein dies of AIDS. Once you've read the account of Julien's last months, months he spends immersed in his painting, the cover of this novel will make sense to you -- you will be very touched by the depiction of the architect and his dog. The painting on the cover is meaningful because it's just like the paintings Julien does in the novel.

In addition to being a funny and sad account of his relationship with Julien, "The Married Man" is generally a fine account of White's years in Paris -- the struggles of fitting in to a foreign culture with limited language skills (making friends, finding an apartment, learning his way around the city). I've always loved the way White is capable of making his life seem so exotic while yet depicting himself as so fallible and human -- he describes his own insecurities with startling clarity. White talks about the nervous care with which he goes about assembling a small group of Parisian friends for dinner parties at his apartment; we see his bumbling attempt to enjoy and succeed in his visiting professor position in Providence, Rhode Island, which ends in embarrasment and minor failure; and finally, we see White confused and frustrated as he travels through Morocco with Julien, while Julien is dying of AIDS, while White desperately tries to help Julien keep his dignity as his body fails; it's painful to read of White's attempts to express his love for Julien during their last days together, when Julien's mind is failing.

White's spellbinding ability to capture the subtle nuances of characters and situations is in full flower in this novel, just as it was in "Symphony." In just a sentence or two, White can sketch a character so deftly that you feel as though you know them well. White is a master at capturing the quirks, eccentricities, gestures, loves, and irritating tics of the people around him -- and this ability to describe characters so accurately is what brings his novels to life. You will find these gem-like passages on every page of this new novel.

In a recently published biography of Edmund White, White is quoted as saying, "All of my plots are only scrapbooks of my life." True to that model, "The Married Man" makes a fine addition to White's series of fictional scrapbooks. I highly recommend it.