In the following review, Wilson asserts that "In White's growing-up novel, [A Boy's Own Story, the tale of the child's peregrinations in the treacherous land of desire is, finally, secondary to the 'story' of the adult's struggle to bring all to mind, to integrate his various selves by coming to love them."]

A Boy's Own Story is on the face of it a book about growing up; behind its title lies the salubrious little-manly world of the Boy's Own Paper, with its emphasis on adventure, instruction and initiative; further off stand Mark Twain, Richard Jefferies, H. O. Sturgis, even Forrest Reid. Edmund White's primary irony is to make his the story of a homosexual boy; the time-scheme is jigged around so that there is some brisk buggery in the first chapter, and the sexual latencies of the Edward...

Edmund White has crossed "The Catcher in the Rye" with "De Profundis," J. D. Salinger with Oscar Wilde, to create an extraordinary novel. It is a clear and sinister pool in which goldfish and piranhas both swim. In "A Boy's Own Story," a nameless narrator looks back at his youth with irony, affection and sorrow. What he sees is a child as alienated, self-conscious and perceptive as any protagonist in the whole catalogue of 20th-century Bildungsromane. His par...