In [Nocturnes for the King of Naples], White resumes his exploration of the textuality of experience, but moves from ritual to romance.

As its pretext, the novel evokes and is addressed to a lost, and therefore ideal, lover—presumably an older man who rescued the narrator, was later betrayed by him and died. In one sense, then, it is the Psyche's reminiscence of Eros, and its chapters are the narrator's meditations on the echoes of an original erotic transcendence in his subsequent affairs and ménages, which comprise the world of experience fallen from a mysterious grace. As a narrative ploy, White's sensuous scholium has the emotional power and melo-dramatic advantages of Proust's brooding over the captive and vanished Albertine. But White's quest is at once as intimate as and more extensive than Proust's, since his conjured and elusive god—the fallible god that love's religion creates—is only invoked as you…. (p. 97)

"You," the second person, the Other within us and abroad. Episodes of the novel's "amorous history" are purposely juxtaposed with literally homesick, fantastic memories of the narrator's parents, a romantic suicide and a sexual pasha. As the perspective shifts from that of love's victim to that of love's child, one realizes the scope of White's quest and its repertory of images. Insofar as this child is father of the narrator, the novel's eerie nostalgia identifies the lost redemptive you not only with versions of the Other but with stages of the self's own past. Or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say, that the interfacing family romance becomes our clue that the novel's indulgent memories are its dialogue of self and soul.

If that suggests that Nocturnes can be read as a long, perplexed invocation of the artist's muse, there is a further sense in which it can be devised as a cunning apostrophe to the reader himself, the you-as-audience implicit in any fiction's calculation and appeal. And we are meant to be wooed not only by the plot's haunting refrains but by White's baroque style itself. His text has a mind of its own; conceits, introduced to define and ornament an immediate detail, generate independent lives of their own and wander on until one senses how cleverly their images are latent or overt readings of the tale itself. White writes a heady, luxuriant prose, which he plies with a poet's prodigal finesse and a moralist's canny precision. Nabokov's example may be held up to this book, even against it, but White is a superior stylist of both erotic theology and plangent contrition. And his special gift is his ability to empty out our stale expectations from genres … and types … and to reimagine them in a wholly intriguing and convincing manner. The astonishing stylistic virtuosity of Nocturnes may distract an absorbed but careless reader from White's power to create compelling contemporary myths. But it is that power that dominates his moving portrait of refracted feeling. This book more than fulfills the terms of "promising novelist" that Forgetting Elena prompted. White must now be reckoned an important one, and reckoned with as a crucial figure among those attempting to transform the novel from transcript to text. Nocturnes is a brilliant, provocative, and commanding achievement. (p. 98)