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 Edwardian literature of boyhood are rendered emphatically overt. This is, in fact, a mere showing of the hand: there is next to no sexual description in the rest of the book, for its real subject is not sex but sensibility. The preliminary cornholing with Kevin in A Boy's Own Story is an exception in an early life which is all unfocused longing, reiterative fantasy … and vain speculation.
Many of White's observations are piercingly acute, his ruminations subtle and irresistible. His settings—schools, summer-houses, medium-sized towns—are poignantly caught. He evokes the extreme singleness and the baroque imaginative convolutions of adolescence with absolute conviction. He describes with precision the years of vacuous joshing, the defensive inarticulacy of boys, and how this particular boy reads into such inarticulacy a belief in passions which are not only unspoken but prove not to exist. He focuses a welcome degree of attention on the significance of art and classical music for youngsters, worlds in which the articulation of fantasy scenarios is miraculously achieved. But this precision and art are often rendered by preciosity and artiness.
