Forgetting Elena

This is a classic novel, and one that works on several levels. A satire of Fire Island gay culture? Yes, but it works even if you have no idea that this is what the book is supposed to be "about," as I didn't when I first read it years ago. The prose is seamlessly perfect, and the device of the amnesiac narrator, which shouldn't work, actually does.

This is not an easy book. It is striking and memorable. If you read it more for the immediate effect of the imagery rather than try to figure out a plot or the characters, it is much more rewarding. I'm not knowledgeable about the model of Fire Island society but that is secondary anyway. If you are looking for a real page-turner, this book is not for you. If you read slowly and visualize what the author describes, you will be amply rewarded.This book may be about life on a beach but it is not a "beach book."

A vanished gay culture and setting (recognizably The Pines in the 1960s) transformed into an icy fantasy, with details borrowed from the ceremonial court life of ancient Japan and Java. An amnesiac narrator finds himself in an imaginary island society, at once funny and horrific, where refined, ever-changing rules govern the slightest action. He must somehow deduce his own identity from the enigmatic offhand remarks of others around him while not giving himself away.Though infused with a gay sensibility, this is not a "gay book". In it, obsessive aestheticism and obsessive love face each other, gradually becoming deadly enemies.

White's first novel is a fascinating study of an obsessive mind in action. The narrator, who lives on an island that in some ways resembles Fire Island, is a compulsive amnesiac who is apparently terrified to admit to anyone that he doesn't know who he is or what his relationship is to the people around him. It is clear he would feel embarassed if anyone found out. But as he attempts to determine his status in this highly stratified society, it is clear that its values are very much a part of his subconscious. Truly a book in which form reflects content, the style of the writing is self-conscious and always exquisitely phrased. This book is not for everyone. For me, however, this novel is one of the masterpieces of 20th-century literature. It is simultaneously a mystery, a comedy of manners and a haunting love story.

This is a slim, lush novel set on Fire Island in the 1960's, and written years before the plague of AIDS. Its subject is the intoxicating, intimidating, seductive, and ultimately cruelly destructive hip gay demimonde: the ruling class there -- and its "subjects." Gifted and kind-hearted novelist-critic-memoirist-teacher Edmund White's first novel, and the one that got him noticed, then praised by Nabokov and many others. It describes a lost world, but has much to say about the one remaining. Beautifully constructed and definitely worth reading.