Volume 47, Number 13 · August 10, 2000
Coupling
By John Banville
The Married Man
by Edmund White
Knopf, 321 pp., $25.00
Edmund White: The Burning World
by Stephen Barber
St. Martin's, 310 pp., $25.95
The Boy with the Thorn in His Side: A Memoir
by Keith Fleming
Morrow, 205 pp., $24.00
Does life need art, as art undoubtedly needs life? At the end of Lolita, we leave Humbert Humbert 'thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art,' for this, he believes, is the only immortality he and his beloved nymphet may share. But must a memorial require all the impediments of a fully fashioned, burnished work of art? Why make fancy fictions of life's ordinary pleasures and poignancies? Why not say what happened?
Review, 4059 words
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