Have you ever wondered what a book of reminiscences by Uncle Monty from Withnail & I might be like? Well, look no further. Edmund White’s A Previous Life reads precisely how one might imagine it, with all the lengthy asides, meandering passages and endless high-falutin’ referencing one would expect.
The structure is disorientating but centres, at least initially, around a married couple, Constance and Ruggero, living about 30 years hence, who decide to read their “confessions” to one another. These consist of discordant, draft-like sections of text written from each of their perspectives, interspersed with thoughts and snippets of conversation, that trickle back over their past sexual experiences.
For no especial reason, early on Ruggero breaks his leg while skiing. Later, Constance abruptly leaves him for a neighbouring American, undoing with a sharp snip the already unconvincing efforts to make her a rounded, believable character. (One senses, almost immediately, that she’s nothing more than a prop for the true subject of White’s interest – Ruggero – who is written, in turn, as a person might write about Picasso’s Guernica with their nose to the canvas.)
As these romances and sexual exploits are revealed, it becomes apparent that the other real focus of the book is “Edmund White”, a fictionalised version of the author, to whom Ruggero once declared love before promptly abandoning.
Tellingly, this relationship between White and Ruggero was supposed to have happened around the time of the pandemic, suggesting the possibility of a hastily written book based in recent experience – although, of course, that’s mere supposition on my part, the result of attempting to explain its otherwise baffling existence. It reads like someone trying to rationalise a break-up in the immediate aftermath, the literary devices therein (Constance’s poorly written character, the distancing of time, the often epistolary or mock biographical structure) coming across as no more than that: shoehorned literary devices.
But then, White is too intelligent for such self-indulgence, so perhaps this messy text is a masterpiece, and my confusion and irritation evidence only of my philistinism. Certainly, I wondered, more than once, if I was reading a parody, some sort of extended, academic in-joke. Except it was too long and drawn out to be funny and, alas, the punchline never came.
