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...

Edmund White's four previous books split neatly into two general categories—novels highly acclaimed for their polished prose … and nonfiction books on gay society…. A Boy's Own Story is a poignant combination of the two genres, a first-person novel … about a boy growing up homosexual in the 1950s, and written with the flourish of a master stylist. (pp. 75-6) The story winds fluently through events of the narrator's youth. The boy is cursed with a maddening fa...

White's shimmering style in this memoir of a homosexual childhood makes every sentence a pleasure to read, and then once that initial savoring is past, we can linger with his on-target observations and candid retrospection. "A Boy's Own Story" is by no means limited to a homosexual audience—it touches universal bases with smashing success. The narrator recalls his days as a precocious, intellectual boy, the only son in a broken home…. Enchanted by books, dreaming of...