The Review of Contemporary Fiction
The Married Man by Edmund WhiteDavid Bergman
Edmund White. The Married Man. Knopf, 2000. 310 pp. $25.00.
The plot of Edmund White’s latest novel, The Married Man, is simple enough: Austin Smith, a lonely, middle-aged, American art historian living in Paris, meets a young, supposedly aristocratic, and essentially heterosexual Frenchman named Julien, who is in the process of divorcing his wife. They fall in love. Austin is seropositive, and, after much fear of losing Julien, finally discloses his HIV status. When Julien proves to be seropositive as well, Austin blames himself for infecting Julien, even though the doctor tells Austin that there is only the smallest chance that he could have done so. Julien becomes ill and dies. Only after Julien’s death does Austin learn of Julien’s lower-class background and extensive gay experience. Moralists might say that The Married Man is about deception, or about self-deception, but White is concerned about the way couples live out the myths they have created about their relationship and whether or not it corresponds to the facts of their life. The Married Man challenges one of the most powerful myths associated with AIDS: its power to strip away the polite, artificial surface of reality and force people to confront how they really are. White shows how, in the face of a terminal disease, people cling even more tenaciously to the narratives they have constructed about themselves and each other. Indeed, because modern medical practice strips patients so mercilessly of any sense of privacy, mystery, or dignity, patients and their families may need to hold on more than ever to the protective coloring of their personal myths. White’s sexual explicitness masks a deeper discretion about the complexities and irrationalities of love. Elegantly written and grippingly narrated, The Married Man is White’s most readable novel. [David Bergman]