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.

From the start we recognize a tendency to elaborate metaphor: "The night, intent seamstress, fed the fabric of water under the needle of our hull"; "the waves dragon scales writhing under a sainted knight's halo"; when he evokes "the fell of shame" the intensely self-conscious usage must be an echo of Hopkins. Nineties feyness is one ingredient in a manner that shows a disconcerting instability. Time and again a dense but effective paragraph is whipped up to an ecstasy of metaphorical contrivance. When we read of fish as "dripping, squirming ore being extracted from the lake's mines" we hear the tones of a school prize essay, the metaphor being pursued to the full extent of its failure. But then, "the terrible, decaying Camembert of my heart"; "the torso flowering out of the humble calyx of his jeans"; "the windblown hair intricate as Velázquez's rendering of lace"; "a dog's stale turd leeched of everything except its palest quintessence" are turns of speech which, supposedly drawing us into keener insight, succeed only in distancing us in mirth, embarrassment or incredulity. A recurrent image of the unrecognized latency of the boy is that of princes, or kings, in disguise; but when we read "I was basalt with indignation" we are hearing the forced and yet strangely complacent diction of queens. People whom White evokes "tangled up in the tulle of thought" are indulging in something closely akin to the drag-ball of his language.

As the novel's concern is with sensibility so its success, and its convincingness as invented autobiography, will depend on the sensibility with which it is rendered. This remains critically uncertain. Is White merely writing in as fine a fashion as he can; or is he intentionally challenging some assumed norm of decorous heterosexual writing by creating a style that is overblown, self-advertising, narcissistic, the livery of a specifically homosexual literary position? The caressing artifice with which the boy is treated by the man he has become locks them in a strange bond of vanity, but it is impossible to assess how consciously and how ironically this quality is established and admitted by Edmund White.