Forgetting Elena (1973)
Combining glittering wit, an atmosphere dense in social paranoia, and a breathtaking elegance and precision of language, Edmund White’s first novel suggests a hilarious apotheosis of the comedy of manners.
For, on the privileged island community where Forgetting Elena is set, manners are everything. Or so it seems to White’s excruciatingly self-conscious young narrator, who desperately wants to be accepted in this world, where everything from one’s bathroom habits to the composition of “spontaneous” poetry is subject to rigid—if unstated—conventions. But no sooner has he begun to intuit the island’s Byzantine codes than the mysterious and charismatic Elena is urging him to transgress them, with results that are at once shocking and wickedly funny.
