Edmund White: Fanny: A Fiction

Reviewed by PETER WELLS

Novels are often the sites of the most unlikely meetings, and here we have the urbane Edmund White meeting, imaginatively, Fanny Trollope, mother of the great writer, Anthony, and famous in her own time for dissing, ruthlessly, uncouth American manners.

Fanny: A Fiction is White's reimagination of her life, told in the first person and disguised, for whatever reason, as the biography of another Fanny - Fanny Wright, early feminist and the first woman in America to oppose slavery. It is a curious meeting, to say the least.

White is best known for his (homo)sexually explicit writing which always displays the highest level of emotional intelligence. He is a cultivated, Henry James kind of American, brought into the 21st century with eyes wide open.

Here he is attempting an unhomosexual novel, about a stridently uncharismatic feminist - a woman whom Fanny Trollope sees close-up as a kind of emotionally blind fraud. It could be humorous, but White seems tangled up in Fanny Trollope's own kind of blindness.

She is an endearing old frump who has dragged her family to America, to penury, to the very brink of disaster, by her own pursuit of ideals and ideas. The narrative is peppered with walk-on parts of the one-time famous: Lafayette, Browning the poet, Robert Owen the early socialist.

But for me this novel comes to life when White leaves behind his somewhat arduous research. It is when he is most frankly fictional that he brings his story alive. Perhaps not uncoincidentally, this is when Fanny has a touching affair, late in her life, with a runaway slave. The conceit, that her son is having an affair with another man whom Fanny believes is in love with her, also animates White's story.

I wondered whether it was in Fanny Trollope's "maturity" that White was finding a persona. White himself must be nearly 60, and it is in Fanny's human predicament, of having an extremely lively mind in an ageing body, that this novel comes closest to its pith. Gossipy, only occasionally self-doubting, Fanny Trollope was a survivor, a working mother with grit and spirit - yet full of self-delusion.

Fanny Wright, about whom she is writing, becomes a sort of distorted mirror in which Fanny Trollope sees herself. Perhaps, in the end, the very reflexive nature of the narrative is too attenuated. Meetings are sometimes best at their frankest, even crudest. This is where Edmund White, in the past, has been most at home.

I wondered whether he was trying to make a home for himself, in this new century, in an invented past - yet one in which he does not seem completely and absolutely at home.

To be frank, Edmund is no Fanny. But this book, as all of Edmund White's work, is not without its pleasures.

Random House, $59.95

***

Peter Wells is an Auckland writer and film-maker.