Product Description

A middle-aged American works out in a Paris gym - an ordinary day, except that he catches the eye of a stranger, Julien, a young French architect with a gleam in his eye. Nothing will come of this, thinks Austin, wary and on the rebound from a bruising affair. Yet slowly, to his amused astonishment, life takes on the colour of romance. As they dash between Bohemian suppers and glittering salons, all they have to deal with are comic clashes of cultures, of ages, of temperaments. But there is sadness in Julien's past and a grim cloud on the horizon. Soon, with increasing desperation, their quest for health and happiness drives them to Rome, to the shutterered squares of Venice, to Key West in the sun, Montreal in the snow and Providence in the rain - landscapes soaked with feeling which lead, in the end, to the bleak, baking sands of the Sahara. "The Married Man" is alive with wit, full of extraordinary characters and electric sexuality. But above all, it is a love story. Haunting, aching, stripped of sentiment, it carries the reader - like Austin himself - into untravelled countries, over the rim of love and loss.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #456026 in Books
• Published on: 2001-03-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Austin Smith, 49-year-old American cultural journalist and 18th-century French furniture specialist living in Paris, meets Julien, 29-year-old French architect, at the gym. Although Julien is The Married Man, it's not long before the two are an established couple, attempting to deal with Julien's unexpected illness, his mysterious family past and his conventional bourgeois mores--so distant from those espoused by 1970s gay product Austin--as they flit with "Aids-restlessness" between Paris and the French countryside, Italy, North Africa and the US.

Edmund White's fiction has always drawn on his own experience, from A Boy 's Own Story to The Beautiful Room is Empty to The Farewell Symphony--indeed, The Married Man reworks a final section of that last, monumental elegy. It's impossible to imagine Austin Smith, ageing HIV-positive American expatriate in Paris, without seeing Edmund White, expatriate HIV-positive American author in Paris, exploring his "posthumous, post-diagnosis, foreign days". And, thanks to Stephen Barber's biography, Edmund White: The Burning World, it's an easy enough job for the curious to make the more detailed connections. Yet White 's writing has never been lazily autobiographical and here, writing in the third person, he seems at even greater pains to distance himself from Austin, who is presented with no little comic irony. Partly, that comes with the territory of being an American in Paris: "Austin was a foreigner and what he did and said were thrown into relief." However, his foreignness, in turn, is a useful lens for viewing the US as an alien, a horribly unintellectual culture; some of the book 's finest moments come as Austin starts teaching in Providence, Rhode Island, painfully oblivious to the recent cultural shifts of his homeland, adrift and belligerent in a brave new world of political correctness and homeboys, unable to grasp that the simple fact of being a gay man does not necessarily make him a woman's best friend. The resultant distancing of author from hero makes for a far tauter, less self-indulgent writing--and a love story that is at times banal and irritating but never less than convincing and, at its climax, unbearably moving. White writes of "the tackiness of survival" that leads "inevitably" to forgetting and faithfulness; in The Married Man he has ensured that one great love story cannot be forgotten or betrayed. --Alan Stewart

Amazon.co.uk Review
Austin Smith, 49-year-old American cultural journalist and 18th-century French furniture specialist living in Paris, meets Julien, 29-year-old French architect, at the gym. Although Julien is The Married Man, it 's not long before the two are an established couple, attempting to deal with Julien's unexpected illness, his mysterious family past and his conventional bourgeois mores--so distant from those espoused by 1970s gay product Austin--as they flit with "Aids-restlessness" between Paris and the French countryside, Italy, North Africa and the US.

Edmund White's fiction has always drawn on his own experience, from A Boy 's Own Story to The Beautiful Room Is Empty to The Farewell Symphony--indeed, The Married Man reworks a final section of that last, monumental elegy. It's impossible to imagine Austin Smith, ageing HIV-positive American expatriate in Paris, without seeing Edmund White, expatriate HIV-positive American author in Paris, exploring his "posthumous, post-diagnosis, foreign days". And, thanks to Stephen Barber 's recent biography, Edmund White: The Burning World, it's an easy enough job for the curious to make the more detailed connections. Yet White 's writing has never been lazily autobiographical and here, writing in the third person, he seems at even greater pains to distance himself from Austin, who is presented with no little comic irony. Partly, that comes with the territory of being an American in Paris: "Austin was a foreigner and what he did and said were thrown into relief". However, his foreignness, in turn, is a useful lens for viewing the US as an alien, horribly unintellectual, culture; some of the book 's finest moments come as Austin starts teaching in Providence, Rhode Island, painfully oblivious to the recent cultural shifts of his homeland, adrift and belligerent in a brave new world of political correctness and homeboys, unable to grasp that the simple fact of being a gay man does not necessarily make him a woman's best friend. The resultant distancing of author from hero makes for a far tauter, less self-indulgent writing--and a love story that is at times banal and irritating but never less than convincing and, at its climax, unbearably moving. White writes of "the tackiness of survival" that leads "inevitably" to forgetting and faithfulness; in The Married Man he has ensured that one great love story cannot be forgotten or betrayed.--Alan Stewart

Customer Reviews

another semi-autobiographical gem
Those of us who have read White since "A Boy's Own Story" will feel on familiar territory here: the narrator is a thinly-disguised version of White himself, with his insecurities and guilt at surviving AIDS in the US driving him to return to Europe. His account of his affair in France and the US with "the married man" of the title is as good as anything he has written so far, sharpened perhaps by living outside the US and realising the absurdities of the place when he moves back. His description of his lectures on 18th century furniture making being criticised for sexism are a tongue-in-cheek dig at the absurdities of academic political correctness, where even a small provincial college has a "Dean of Gender and Equality Issues" At times, the novel veers into bucolic reverie: the joyous couple of months spent in the French countryside is contrasted with the nastiness of small-town America, but the observation and reflection that made White's other novels so enjoyable are here in abundance, and like them, it is difficult not to devour this whole book in one sitting.

In Sickness and in Health
In the early 90s, a middle-aged American finds love in the form of an aristocratic Parisian architect, named Julien. This amuses the American, Austin, for his previous lover (who jilted him), was also named Julien. So, Austin's new lover becomes 'Big Julien', whilst his ex becomes 'Little Julien'.

There are a few problems with this new relationship. Firstly, Julien is married, and has a tragic past. Secondly, Austin is HIV positive. So, much of the first part of the novel is concerned with Austin's reluctance to come totally clean with his lover. After all, Austin's already insecure about the age gap between the two men. Would not such a declaration make himself look far less attractive? A middle-aged man, with excellent social contacts in the French aristocracy, but with no real money to show for himself?

In the first part of the novel, it is very hard to feel anything for Austin or Julien, since their world is one that is closed off for most of us. It is hard to feel sympathy for those who move in circles that can quite happily invite Lauren Bacall to a party - it's hard to emphasize with such poor rich folk. And we get to see very little of the romance or bond between Austin and Julien. Since the whole novel revolves around Austin, it seems strange that Edmund White chose not for him to narrate the novel in the first person. So Austin seems more remote than he should, whilst Julien appears almost inscrutable. Sometimes the author is also quite clumsy in referring to the period in which the novel is set. Do we really need to know that White's protagonists fly into France, rather than travelling by train, since the channel tunnel was not yet complete?

Once Austin leaves the rarefied setting of France, and goes to teach in Providence in the U.S., the novel improves immeasurably. Austin and Julien are separated by the drama of American immigration laws. For a while, it seems to the casual observer that Edmund White could be pandering to the Cultural Studies crowd (in which school his work is often appraised), by his use of language. It's ironic that Austin's French audience jokily accuse him of being too theoretical, since his lack of theory seems to be the one thing holding him back at the American university, as he's caught in the minefield of political correctness. Here, Austin takes a swipe at the deconstructionists, post-structuralists, and gay theorists. It's also in America that we meet another one of Austin's previous lovers, Peter, who is slowly dying of AIDS. Julien dislikes this spoilt, whining American, but Austin cannot abandon the man he'd promised he'd nurse through his illness...

Edmund White's characters do come alive, after a while, and the portraits of Josephine and Henry McVay are excellent, along with Ajax, Julien's basset hound. AIDS may seem to have been cured, but there are still long, drawn-out deaths to be had from it, as the author shows. Here is where Edmund White it at his most powerful. As for the 'married man'? At the resolution of this novel, it seems that Edmund White's choice of title could be more complex than it initially appears.

White's astounding prose and clarity
I want to make this short. White writes the most beautiful, concise and meaningful prose of any living writer I can think of. There is nothing here that is gloss; more painfully there is nothing here that is less than searingly honest. For me the directness of his approach, together with his exquisite craft, make this novel pretty much one of the finest I've read. I adored this book.