Product Description

In Edmund White's most moving novel yet, an American living in Paris finds his life transformed by an unexpected love affair.

Austin Smith is pushing fifty, loveless and drifting, until one day he meets Julien, a much younger, married Frenchman. In the beginning, the lovers' only impediments are the comic clashes of culture, age, and temperament. Before long, however, the past begins to catch up with them. In a desperate quest to save health and happiness, they move from Venice to Key West, from Montreal in the snow to Providence in the rain. But it is amid the bleak, baking sands of the Sahara that their love is pushed to its ultimate crisis.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #937202 in Books
• Published on: 2001-09-11
• Released on: 2001-09-11
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

From Amazon.com
Edmund White majored in sexual explicitness with his boldly autobiographical trilogy--A Boy's Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, and The Farewell Symphony. Now, explicitly as ever, he trains his unflinching eye on a new subject: a young man's death from AIDS. Austin is a fiftysomething American expat in Paris; Julien is a young married man he meets at the gym. Much to Austin's surprise, Julien calls him and soon they are sharing a bed and a life. The Married Man is White's Henry James novel: the first couple hundred pages show us a satirical portrait of young Julien as a stuffy Frenchman and a more elliptical portrait of Austin's apprehension of French culture through his lover. With Julien, "Austin was always learning things, not necessarily reasoned or researched information but rather all those thousands and thousands of brand names, turns of phrase, aversions and anecdotes that make up a culture as surely as do the moves in a child's game of hopscotch."

But White wants to take us all the way to the end of this relationship. Austin is HIV positive, and it soon becomes clear that Julien has AIDS. As Julien's health unravels, the two travel to Providence, to Key West, to Venice, to Rome, and ultimately to Morocco. The author coins a darkly appropriate phrase for this urge to move: he calls it "AIDS-restlessness." White, in fact, unveils a whole gallery of startling images as Julien nears death. Julien is "the bowler hat descending into the live volcano." Thin and brown and bearded, he looks "like the Ottoman Empire in a turn-of-the-century political cartoon." Though he can't read it, Julien acquires a copy of the Koran. "It was the perfect book for a weary, dying man--pious, incomprehensible pages to strum, an ink cloud of unknowing." White has found a language both magical and clinical to describe a horrible death. --Claire Dederer

From Publishers Weekly
In recent years, veteran novelist White (A Boy's Own Life; The Farewell Symphony) has turned to transatlantic themes (as in his biography of Genet). This Jamesian turn continues in the tale of Austin Smith, an expatriated scion of decayed Southern gentry, who lives on Ile Saint Louis, in Paris. Austin, an expert on 18th-century French furniture, is HIV positive but healthy when he becomes the lover of Julien, a married architect more than 20 years Austin's junior who is in the process of divorcing his wife. Throughout the first half of the novel, Austin maintains a protective distance, allowing him to see, all too clearly, Julien's pretensions and foibles. Austin keeps his HIV status secret from Julien until the latter gets the flu, which frightens Austin into a confession. When Austin gets a job teaching in Providence, R.I., he brings Julien with him. But a complication with Julien's visa, and Austin's restlessness, have the pair repeatedly flying back and forth between America and France. Meanwhile, Julien is diagnosed with AIDS, and his health disintegrates. The couple become a frustrated threesome when Austin feels responsible for a whiny, dim ex-lover named Peter, also dying of AIDS; Peter and Julien instantly detest each other. White's candor about the ways egotism is incompletely subsumed in love shows up in many wonderful touches; White illustrates perfectly, for example, the ways in which Austin's generosity to Julien and Peter, both much younger men, infantilizes them. His descriptions of Paris, Venice and Morocco are infused with an almost Matisse-like sensuality, but sometimes the author's evident intelligence seems wasted on his self-absorbed characters. In the perspicuity of White's art, however, even the vapid Julien, dying in Morocco, evokes pathos and terror, bestowing this love story with a classically tragic aura. BOMC featured selection; QPB selection; Reader's Subscription selection; to be featured in BOMC's new, as-yet-unnamed gay and lesbian book club. (June)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Chubby, healthy, and HIV-positive, Austin is a fiftyish connoisseur of French furniture who lives in Paris. His days are pleasant but a bit unfocused, his love life sexually charged if romantically emptyDuntil, in the midst of one of his desultory workouts at the gym, he meets Julien. A much younger, bisexual, married, and oh-so-French architect, Julien is quickly smitten with Austin. Their courtship is one of the greatest boy-meets-boy stories ever, as engrossing and satisfying as can be found in any romance fiction. Paris, with its dinner parties and sophisticated society, serves as a dazzling backdrop, giving White (The Farewell Symphony) ample opportunity for hilarious social commentary. Just when the couple seems to settle into marriage, the most unexpected happens: young Julien becomes sick. With unflinching honesty, White chronicles Julien's illness and Austin's care for him, as they move from Paris to Providence to Key West, back to Paris, and, finally, to the Sahara. This shift from fun and frothy Paris to a more closed and personal world of illness and loss is brilliant; the reader can only be left devastated. As always, White writes beautifully, but there is a greater urgency in the telling and a new emphasis on character. Nowhere in his writing has he created someone as powerfully alive as Julien, "the married man." Recommended for all public libraries.
-DBrian Kenney, Metropolitan Museum of Art Lib., New York
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Not What I Expected
I guess I looked for White to provide thought provoking insight into the older/younger gay relationship. I found the book dull and lacking any real direction. The characters were uninteresting and one demensional. The plot dragged on and on and never really went anywhere. I actually found myself skipping paragraphs trying to get to the point of the story. I apologize to anyone who might find this review offensive, but I didn't enjoy this book at all.

Not really worth reading
Austin Smith is a middle-aged American writer, living in Paris, looking for new love from men. He meets Julien, a young married man...

I enjoyed reading 'A Boy's Own Story', written by this writer, which I rated very highly, and therefore I thought I would read another book by Edmund White. However, 'The Married Man' was a disappointing read.

'The Married Man' lacks much in the way of plot. Instead, its content depends mainly on the main character leading a not spectacularly unusual life, but travelling from place to new place and to new venues far too often, extravagantly, rather than working, so the writer can then describe in detail yet another set of new scenes and events and characters and yet more huge expenditure in the new place/venue. That method of creating a book, and the absence of much interesting plot besides, made the book tiresome after a while. I felt I was being made to read material that had being written simply in order to pad the book out unnecessarily.

The content itself becomes quite depressing in the second half of the book.

The style of writing, often with very long turgid sentences and over-complicated similes, suggests the book has been too overwritten ('A Boy's Own Story', in contrast, had a much more interesting, direct, snappy style of writing to it).

Frankly, the main characters aren't likeable (apart from Ajax).

This book was slow going to read, and not a pleasurable experience: more a grim slow turning of the pages, just to finish the thing off.

The writer hasn't really attempted any form of climax to the book, or even a good ending, either. He just lets the book tail off into nothingness after 310 pages.

Overall, this didn't seem to me to be a book worth reading, and I was sorry to have spent time going through it.

Les choses que nous faisons pour l'amour
Edmund White's 'The Married Man' is the first work I have read by this author written in the third person, which was a far cry from the three prior novels I devoured last year, his autobiographical 'Boy's Own Story' trilogy.

In picking up this book, I entered it with a sneaking suspicion that the two main characters; Austin and Julien, were variations on White himself, and his lover Hubert Sorin. Austin is an author, like White himself. Sorin was an architect, just as Julien is when Austin meets him. Sorin passed away in 1994 of AIDS complications, the novel is set in that same time period...etc, etc, etc,....there are too many parallels to White's own story for it not to be a continuation of where he left off with 'The Farewell Symphony'. And so, the choice to tell the story as an 'observer' or 'outsider' by writing it in the third person is a matter of curiosity to me...as if White himself could not 'make the story real' by putting himself into it as narrator...like the story as a whole is still too painful for him to tell as his own.

About 100 pages into this novel, I emailed a new acquaintance with some thoughts that the protagonist and his lover were both 'unlikable' characters to me...Austin came across as extremely co-dependent; Julien as selfish, emotionally protracted, and abusive. Through the circumstances of the story, it is hard to not feel a degree of sympathy for both the characters eventually, but initially it was hard (for me) to become engaged with either one of them.

As in the other novels I have read by the same author, White has a 'baring of the soul' approach to character development unlike most authors I have read. They are self-effacing; emotionally raw; virtually unable to hide any unattractive facet or character flaw from their chronicler...White lays out most all his characters like 'open wounds' and invites readers to gape at them.

The story itself, that of an HIV positive man who meets and falls in love with an initially married man, who then finds himself succumbing to full-blown AIDS...is full of the same emotions I have found in other works by White. While I experienced a feeling of malaise with the co-dependency of Austin, and the abrasiveness of Julien, White labels Austin as co-dependent by the end of the story; and Julien's story becomes so heart-wrenching that it is near impossible to not try to understand the anguish invoking his treatment of those around him, especially Austin...as if his relationship with Austin was the most honest, because he displayed his real feelings to him, and didn't sugar coat them like he did with others...who in retrospect called him 'always cheerful and good-natured'...

While I enjoyed this novel overall, I have to give it only 4 stars in rating it, due to the fact that I think White's writing is a lot less 'detached' when it is written in first person. I would have to explore another third person novel to really make an informed conclusion, but...in comparing Married Man to the other three I have read...they come across as if White was far more 'involved' in them by inserting himself as narrator.

However, this is a good read by a wonderful author, and I recommend it highly.