An Octoberfest for Gay Books

Hotel De Dream (Ecco) by Edmund White is a dream of a novel. Written in exquisite prose, White’s latest tells the speculative story of a consumptive Stephen Crane, famous American author of The Red Badge of Courage, while he writes a scandalous book called The Painted Boy, about a gay youth he chances to meet. Such a book was never published, though Crane, ever the journalist/writer did supposedly meet a male prostitute with whom he was fascinated.

Portions of The Painted Boy do appear throughout the novel as a secondary narrative, mirroring Crane’s real life meeting of the beautiful young prostitute, Elliott. And this narrative is almost the more engaging part of the book. In it, Elliott, the “painted boy,” meets married banker Theodore, who sets Elliott up in an apartment and proceeds to have a talented Italian sculptor produce a beautiful, lifelike marble likeness of the boy. What follows is the stuff of drama.

White’s incorporation of late nineteenth-century gay slang into his narrative makes this a fascinating read. For instance, the term “bisexual,” unlike its meaning today of someone attracted to both sexes, meant someone who is anatomically or genetically male or female but whose sexual identification is otherwise.

Like the popular novel The Alienist by Caleb Carr, White’s novel brings late nineteenth-century New York alive in a vivid way. We can hear and smell and see its distinctive presence: “Elliott loved the populous city, with its miles and miles of slums, those mephitic tenements spread out everywhere and quick with noise and drunken brawls, banging doors and rank cooking smells, unlit passageways and rickety stairs, the sense that every wall and door was just the thinnest possible membrane holding back a boiling larval mess soon to explode and metamorphose into more and more sticky life.”

Hotel De Dream is one of Edmund White’s best novels, showing him in full possession of his ample literary skills.