In search of lost time (and hairy shoulders)

The Married Man by Edmund White (Chatto & Windus, £15.99, 310pp)

Edmund White's latest novel is billed as a fresh start after his autobiographical trilogy. Austin Smith, White's fiftysomething gay, HIV positive hero, is an academic specialising in French furniture of the 18th century. Transplanted to an uneasily artificial Paris to research a weighty encyclopaedia, (not unlike White researching his tome on Genet), he has remained there while the former lover he still loves returns to New York, having developed Aids.

Cruelly dumped by a gold-digging gerontophile called Julien, our hero becomes involved with another Julien, older and hairier, whom he meets at the gym. As romance blossoms, fed by the stories hairy Julien tells of his doomy aristocratic background and crumbling marriage, Austin guiltily fantasises that here is the husband to care for him when he falls sick. Julien, however, gets sick first and dies nightmarishly in the course of a holiday in Morocco. In the last pages, Austin seems oddly undisturbed to discover that the relationship has been built on self-aggrandising lies.

The press release dubs White America's answer to Proust: risky, in a country of gleeful back-stabbers. For all his flavour-of-the-month status, Proust remains principally a byword for the exquisitely prolix. Evidently nobody dared tell White's publishers that the middle book of his trilogy acquired the cruel nickname, "The Beautiful Book is Empty".

The Proust handle is also risky because of the comparisons it begs. White's recent fiction has been a reworking of his own life, certainly, but where Proust is forever analysing himself, society, memory and the compulsions of the heart, White has seemed content to present events as they unfurl. Proust achieves a distancing effect by recasting his amours as heterosexual, even finding a fruitful equivalent for his pining after straight men in Marcel's hankering after the lesbian Albertine. He delights as much in housekeepers and taxi drivers as in society's cream.

White gives us only prosperous, white gay men and a handful of neurotic women. The writers do share a weakness for glamour and the aristocracy; and an ability to skewer a relationship as one might a beetle on a pin.

A cold eye, not a warm heart, has always been White's strength. He can be one of the funniest writers about sex because of his reluctance to adorn, forget or forgive. He serves up unappealing biological detail and clumsy speech patterns with equal precision, to become the nemesis of the lousy one-night-stand. At its best, The Married Man echoes Marcel's relentlessly self-analysing pursuit of the wretchedly ordinary Albertine. The point at which Austin decides to withdraw all sexual contact from Julien without telling him why is as chilling as any of Marcel's cruel tests.

Yet, unlike Proust's relationships, Austin's not-quite-in-love affair is set against no grander scheme, no ironic tapestry. White needs us to care but, old habits dying hard, shows us details no more seductive than Julien's petulance, snobbery, deceitfulness and hairy shoulders. The reader is cast in the uncomfortable role of patiently listening friend.

Or perhaps that is a cunning Proust-parallel. Few readers can read through the yardage of prose in which Marcel reacts to Albertine's death without thinking the lady doth protest too much. And yet the same passage takes on astonishing force if one rereads it as Proust's codified elegy, following his beloved Agostinelli's fatal plane crash. So perhaps we need White's biography fully to appreciate his latest text.

This is not just another Aids novel, however. That genre consisted of fiction written in the face of a seemingly all-powerful virus threatening to destroy, if not gay culture, then the human repositories of its recent memories and skills. Of its nature, it appeared up-to-the-minute. The Darker Proof, a collection of short fiction White co-authored with Adam Mars-Jones, felt like urgent bulletins from a front line. It was among the most powerful writing to emerge from the epidemic.

The Married Man, by contrast, is not up to the minute. It has to be set in the Eighties so the narrative can predate the combination therapies that would have averted Julien's death, even postponed it indefinitely. This is one of the first novels to use Aids merely for the author's tragic purposes, as another writer might use a car crash or cancer.