[Forgetting Elena] utilizes a marvelously fresh and inventive narrative device right from the very beginning: an amnesiac young man gradually realizes that he is caught in a cross fire of several contending coteries who battle for dominance in a closely knit little social group on a summer resort island. The narrator-hero is eager to please his hosts and to do the socially accepted thing, but he has no idea of his own status within the group and he has forgotten the code for distinguishing the desirable from the reprehensible in that particular milieu.

The somewhat fantastic island on which the action is set is easily identifiable as New York's own Fire Island, with its highly stylized rites, charades and inbred snobberies…. But what might at first seem to be merely a witty parody of a particular subculture's foibles and vagaries actually turns out to be something far more serious and profound. In a sequence of three stunning chapters (Chapters II-IV) the hero is made to tote loads of pine needles in a wheelbarrow, not knowing whether this is a rare honor or a humiliating punishment; he joins what he thinks are two fellow outcasts for a stroll on the beach, only to realize that this has made him a member of the most fashionable and sought-after in group on the island; and a mysterious woman explains to him the mechanisms for achieving social ascendancy. These chapters present us with nothing less than a semiology of snobbery, its complete sign system. White's analysis of the drives and pressures common to all groupings, cliques and coteries which are based on the presumption of the members' superiority to the rest of mankind is as revealing and thorough as the one performed by Roland Barthes on the ways in which fashion works in his ground-breaking Système de la mode. (pp. 23-4)

As Edmund White gradually unravels for us the emotional disguises his islanders resort to in order to throw a cloak of elegance over the starkness of their basic drives, he is as attentive to significant social minutiae as Jane Austen was in Emma, as surrealistically inventive in contrasting his characters' social masks and their true selves as Gogol was in "Madman's Diary" and "The Nose," and as geometrically precise in his disposition of dissimilar characters, landscapes, objects and emotions as Robbe-Grillet was in Jealousy. These varied predecessors come to mind while reading this or that portion of Forgetting Elena, but actually the novel owes little to any of them. Under its surface guise of a mocking, light-hearted comedy of manners, decked out in a style of almost balletic buoyancy, Forgetting Elena is an astounding piece of writing—profound, totally convincing and memorable. (p. 24)