Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%
Fiction

The impish slug

Edmund White’s masochistic metafiction
by •
April 2022, no. 441

A Previous Life by Edmund White

Bloomsbury, $29.99 pb, 270 pp

Fiction

The impish slug

Edmund White’s masochistic metafiction
by •
April 2022, no. 441
Edmund White (photograph by Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert/Alamy)
Edmund White (photograph by Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert/Alamy)

What a performance this novel is! And not just in the virtuoso sense. What an exhausting mishmash of contradictions: snobbery, self-abasement, campery, stock masculinity. The whole pastiche is laced with vivid images of what it means to be finally old and ugly.

Leave a comment
Robert Dessaix

Robert Dessaix is a broadcaster, essayist, and memoirist. His most recent books are His most recent book is The Time of Our Lives: Growing older well (2020) and The Pleasures of Leisure (2017).  He is also the author of several other books including the autobiography A Mother’s Disgrace (1994), the novels Night Letters (1996) and Corfu (2001), and the travel memoirs Twilight of Love (2004) and Arabesques (2008).

From the New Issue

You May Also Like

Comment (1)

  • Oh dear! Narcissim through a mocking looking glass. Robert Dessaix excellent review of Edmund White's A Previous Life exoses the sad, seedy, and senseless side of snobbery.
    Posted by Helen Covernton
    26 April 2022

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.