In [Nocturnes for the King of Naples], White resumes his exploration of the textuality of experience, but moves from ritual to romance.

As its pretext, the novel evokes and is addressed to a lost, and therefore ideal, lover—presumably an older man who rescued the narrator, was later betrayed by him and died. In one sense, then, it is the Psyche's reminiscence of Eros, and its chapters are the narrator's meditations on the echoes of an original erotic transcendence in his subsequent affairs and ménages, which comprise the world of experience fallen from a mysterious grace. As a narrative ploy, White's sensuous scholium has the emotional power and melo-dramatic advantages of Proust's brooding over the captive and vanished Albertine. But White's quest is at once as intimate as and more extensive than Proust's, since his conjured and elusive god—the fallible god that love's religion creates—is...