In the 1970s, Paris had fashion, London had the theatre, Berlin had a small painting scene, but New York had all these cultural attainments and more - a vibrant intellectual life. In a decade when New York City was on the verge of bankruptcy, when local headlines were dominated by stories of urban scandal, corruption and violence, the city flourished as never before as the centre of 'uncompromising high culture masquerading as slouching, grinning gee-whiz-Wallace Stevens in sneakers.'
The representative figures of this New York were Susan Sontag, Jasper Johns, George Balanchine and more - fierce cultural arbiters, 'martyrs to art', living in a city that was still obsessed with the hierarchy of the arts and the idea of the Pure. From Isherwood to Mapplethorpe, Borges to Foucault, Brodkey to Burroughs, Edmund White knew them all, and writes about them in City Boy with love, affection, insight and often biting wit. It is a fascinating, personal journey through the vibrant and explosive New York of the 70s with wonderful sideshows in San Francisco and a Venice presided over by the radiant Peggy Guggenheim, and it bounces from literary infighting at the New Yorker to erotic entanglements downtown to the post-Stonewall burgeoning gay scene of artists and writers.
It's a moving, candid, brilliant portrait of a time and place, a book of gossip, a book about sex and genius and living on the breadline, a rounded and stereoscopic vision from one of the most brilliant and engaging writers of his generation, and a book that, movingly, celebrates friendship and friends as two of the most important components of the life well lived.
