Nocturnes' is a set of delicious, affected prose poems by a writer of great talent and high art. 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. 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. The sense of an ending gives the best of these stories an almost unearthly beauty. Passages of extraordinary poignancy are intermixed with the laxest diary-entry dullness. It requires the skill and intuition of an imaginative artist to make these aspects cohere within a single and living portrait . . . If there is a weakness, it is a tendency upon White's part to assert the gay life and consciousness of Proust . . .