But Haydn scored his piece so that two violins were left on stage at the end. It is all the more heartbreaking that that ending, a duet, would have been White's ideal finale as well. Christopher Benfey teaches American literature at Mount Holyoke College. His book ''Degas in New Orleans'' will be published this fall. His America is an atomized country, with few children or parents, with little sense of the past or future.
Random sex is an exalted activity.
Edmund White has crossed 'The Catcher in the Rye' with 'De Profundis,' J.D. Salinger with Oscar Wilde, to create an extraordinary novel. It is a clear and sinister pool in which goldfish and piranhas both swim. This book is, provokingly, a challenge to taste, which is likely to vary from one reader to another or even from moment to moment in the same reader. Several considerations make the book universal. His biography is so meticulously researched and detailed, his understanding and illumination of the works is so rich, that the book ultimately succeeds in resisting the nagging temptation of reductionism.