There is a strange, almost hypnagogic cadence to Edmund White’s prose; the reader becomes slowly embedded in his shadowy and sable world, coalesced with the grey, bleak atmosphere which pervades his novel are explosions of light and brightness, as he prose fulminates into a series of incandescent images ;

“A wind said incantations and hypnotised a match flame up and out of someone’s cupped hands. Now the flame went out and only the cigarette pulsed, each draw molding gold lead to cheekbones. There are qualities of darkness, the darkness of grey silk stretched taut to form the sky, watered by city lights, the darkness of black quartz boiling to make a river…”

If there is more poetry in ‘Nocturnes for the King of Naples’, there is greater emotional resonance in ‘Forgetting Elena’; whereas the narrator of ‘Noctures’ seems detached and indifferent, a streak of tragedy flows through the pages of ‘Forgetting Elena’, as the adolescent narrator explores his feelings for the title character, a brazen, beautiful and troubled woman. However, one of White’s shortcomings-in his early novels at least, is that his characters seem to self-absorbed and selfish to be fully realised; they adhere to tired caricatures of WASP characters, from their superficial and meaningless dalliance with culture and art, to their egotism and self-absorption it is hard for the reader to fully empathise a cast of characters who are not well fleshed out and instead act as the conduit for White to create his bleak, if unique and at times dazzlingly beautiful world view, where the narrator, although heavily involved in the world around him, often seems detached and insensate.

The central theme of both novels is love and sex, especially the budding of adolescent desire ; in ‘Forgetting Elena’ the narrator is having an affair with Elena, yet the narrator seems more curious than emotionally engaged, although he is able to explore the inner life of Elena, who beneath the mask of confidence hides a sea of insecurities and her relationships with the other men on a mysterious, unnamed island. ‘Nocturnes for the King of Naples’ is the promiscuous reminisces. Hidden beneath this is one single paean to a lost lover, who the narrator treated with cruelty and contempt. If this all sounds a bit like pulp fiction then that is because it is-but pulp fiction raised to art via White’s wonderful style and beautiful, incandescent imagery.