It is obvious that White loves words and prose. So much of the book is beautifully written. I want to read some sections over again aloud just to have the experience of having the words pour out of my mouth. But I think White goes overboard a bit at times. I think rather than serving the story, he sometimes got stuck on the aesthetic pleasure of describing certain details. If I were to write about a boy I crushed on in 8th grade, and I compared the fluttering of his eyes to the lace curtains of a farmhouse caught by a spring breeze, the billowing sails of a boat and the flapping of a hummingbird’s wings, and then went on to compare his eyelashes to the hairs on a tarantula’s leg and the soft bristles of my grandmother’s Fuller hairbrush, I think at some point my readers might want to choke the life out of me. But White’s descriptions are much lovelier than mine, and I am quite envious of his abilities even though I think he does go on longer than he needs to quite often.
White has a way of describing the various absurd and sometimes shocking situations his young protagonist gets himself into in a way that is both humorous and heartbreakingly poignant at the same time. However, I think he overplays the humor a little. White’s protagonist is a confused gay boy growing up in the 1950s. He longs for love and romance, but he has no role models, and he knows no one will understand. I think one of the reasons he gets himself caught up in so many ridiculous scenarios is because he’s searching for an identity and a place were he fits in. He manages to fall in with a popular crowd a couple of times during his teen years, but he’s always acting, putting on airs. He never really feels like he belongs. The protagonist is never named, and I think the reason is the boy is lost and in a sense unclaimed. It may be true that most of us struggle with figuring out who we are and who we want to become during our teen years, but this boy has no real peers or real friends, and he can’t imagine he’ll ever be like the adult men he encounters. I don’t think we need to laugh at him so much, but since this was an autobiographical novel, maybe the only way White could tell the story is if he added a large dose of mirth. Maybe that’s the only way he could bear it.
I was surprised by the number of sexual adventures the boy had despite the time period. He has an experience with a developmentally disabled boy at a summer camp when he’s about 13. At 14, he has sex with a male prostitute. Then he and a few boys from his boarding school go to a whore house, and he has a sexual encounter with a female prostitute. At 15, he has sex with one of his teachers and his wife at the same time, and that summer, at his father’s vacation home, he allows the 12-year-old son of his father’s guests to corn hole him.
When I first read A Boy’s Own Story, I greedily drank all of this in. I had some experiences with boys when I was 11, 12 and 13, with one boy in particular, but high school was completely dry, so to speak. By the time I got to college, I was burning with lust and longing. The boy in the story never found intimacy, but he did have sex, and at 20, I was still stinging from all those years when I had to hide my sexuality in a dark dungeon, so I was a little jealous of his juvenile escapades.
Reading the story again as a middle-aged man, I was struck by the difference in the way White’s protagonist, and presumably White himself, lived as compared to the way I lived when I was young. White’s character had certain advantages I only dreamed of. The boy’s father was wealthy. The father was able to support himself and his new wife and the boy, the boy’s sister and his mother. The father paid for the boy to go to boarding school. He could afford to send the boy to a kooky psychoanalyst. The boy went from his mother’s apartment in the city, to his boarding school, to his father’s mansion and his father’s lake house. No one in his family was particularly religious, and certainly no one was evangelical. So the boy didn’t grow up fearing moral condemnation. He thought he might be mentally ill, which is bad enough, but he never saw himself as a sinner or feared that kind of judgment from others. He even came out to his parents, his psychoanalyst, his roommate at school, his teacher and the teacher’s wife.
I guess I might be jealous of the boy for several reasons, even though the boy’s life was far from ideal, but at least no one, except for his sister, tired to burden him with too much shame, and he never feared being physically harmed or thrown out into the street. He had an intellectual curiosity which he was allowed to nurture and develop. The boy was reading great literature, philosophy and studying Buddhism before he was old enough to drive. I think his intellectual tendencies and the fact that his parents were not particularly controlling and the fact that they didn’t have many expectations saved him from a lot of grief.
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