If there were a truth-in-packaging law for books, Edmund White's "States of Desire" would violate it. For he subtitles his book "Travels in Gay America" but rarely mentions lesbians, or settled homosexual couples, or homosexuals who are as interested in their work as in sex, or those who help one another kick drugs and booze rather than abuse them. Instead, he devotes most of his 336 pages to a journey through promiscuous, all-male America—a desolate place to live.

Using a conventional picaresque structure, Mr. White wanders from city to city, but he does not display the kind of literary gifts that would allow him to create a memorable account of the voyage. Travel writers have a special job: to escort their less venturesome readers through unfamiliar physical or psychological terrain. (p. 12)

However, Mr. White … is an inadequate guide. Though his book is partly autobiographical, he never tries to help readers who don't share his sexual preference to understand his assumptions or the assumptions of the people he describes. Indeed, the men he meets rarely seem to interest him, except as potential sexual conquests.

He does nonetheless talk to homosexuals who want to discuss serious problems: he encounters homosexual Mormons in Utah who long to return to their strict, puritanical faith; homosexual Cubans in Miami who are outcasts from their own community and from the Anglo-dominated gay-rights movement; a black man in Atlanta who loves being a parent; a businessman in Portland who is trying to force himself to become heterosexual. But Mr. White never explores their feelings to the point where his characters become real or his own half-hidden commitments and doubts begin to surface. That's probably one reason why his journey doesn't seem to furnish him with any lasting personal discoveries. Ironically, he is self-revealing throughout much of the book without displaying much self-knowledge.

Though he seems to like the promiscuous America he portrays, he never makes it seem even remotely attractive to an outsider. He does, however, make it seem a singularly unhealthy place. At a Fire Island party, for example, men mix Tuinals and Scotch, or Quaaludes and vodka, then use angel dust, cocaine and a drug called MDA to subdue their anxieties and intensify their desire. From Boston to Portland, Mr. White describes night lives filled with similar concoctions. (pp. 12-13)

His America is an atomized country, with few children or parents, with little sense of the past or future. Transient places—bars and baths—are the most important locales. Random sex is an exalted activity….

In that environment, a man must be forever young and attractive…. Most people in "States of Desire" share a dread of getting old….

In this journey through the baths, the bars, the streets full of preening young men, the narcotized one-night stands that are the signposts of nearly every city he visits, Mr. White shares what seems to me his characters' tragic self-delusion. According to Mr. White's description—though not in his rather muddled, complacent assertions—they seem to live in a modern-day inferno, where they despise their own aging flesh, where they inflict ceaseless physical and psychological harm on themselves and one another, all in the name of human happiness. That, to me, is a region close to emotional darkness….

[Mr. White] might have prompted me to see the world he portrays in a somewhat more sympathetic light, and, not incidentally, he might have written a fine, revealing book instead of an aimless, shapeless narrative that sometimes borders on pornography—if only he had enough simple human curiosity, enough skill as an interviewer, enough command of structure and language to show us how he and the people he encountered arrived at the psychological land they occupy now. (p. 13)