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 parents are divorced. His older sister torments him. Because his eccentric father is rich, the boy has material comforts. Because his mother is flighty, his access to both parents is erratic….

This partially deprived child of privilege flees into books and fantasy, which, because they have the order and logic of art, can console him for disorder of life. In them he is majestic, powerful and saved.

A romantic, the boy loves and desires men…. His dreams have elements of eros, elegance and power. In them a glamorous older man may sweep him away; or he, a harsh and desirable young aristocrat, will spurn such a figure.

Indeed, the subject of "A Boy's Own Story" is less a particular boy than the bodies and souls of American men: the teachers and masters; the lovers, brothers, hustlers and friends; the flawed fathers who would be kings to sons who should be princes. Mr. White writes, with shimmering sensuousness, of the male body—of the play of muscle, of light on skin, of the curl of hair.

In this novel, the boy is growing up in the 1950's. He loathes homosexuality. It taints touch, turns scent to stench. At best it is a stage that young girls of perfect femininity will help him through. The boy wants to be popular, not a sissy. The narrator says, "I see now that what I wanted was to be loved by men and to love them back but not to be a homosexual."…

Like so many American novels about coming to maturity, "A Boy's Own Story" asserts that growing up is a descent into painful knowledge, indecency and repression.

Shadowing "A Boy's Own Story" are ghosts of legendary figures other than Holden Caulfield or Oscar Wilde: Orpheus, Adonis, Don Juan, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Hemingway, the Beats. The boy rummages through myth and art for models of manhood, love and sex…. Tradition, incapable of giving the boy real support, is merely titillating. Revising tradition, Mr. White honors the beauty and warns us against the guilt, against the mutilation of male love and homosexual desire.

In "Forgetting Elena" Mr. White mourned the loss of a figure who was at once muse, sister and female lover, in "Nocturnes for the King of Naples" a father and a male lover. In "A Boy's Own Story" he laments the loss of innocence and boyhood. This book is as artful as his two earlier novels but more explicit and grounded in detail, far less fanciful and elusive….

"A Boy's Own Story" has a compelling exactitude. Balancing the banal and the savage, the funny and the lovely. [White] achieves a wonderfully poised fiction.