Nocturnes for the King of Naples
By Edmund White
McNally Editions, June 4, 2024
The letters of a seducer to the great love of his life, a sensual tour-de-force by “the paterfamilias of queer literature” (New York Times).
“Can’t sleep tonight. Was lying in bed reading the biography of a great man whose genius deserted him . . . The genius who deserted me was you.” In a series of late-night letters, gorgeous, funny, filled with memory, sensuality, and regret, a seducer calls across the years to the great love of his youth: an older, revered expatriate known, in his adoptive city, as the King of Naples. As the narrator evokes their affair, in scenes of beauty and remorse, his memories range over the men who came after and before, especially the seductive father who still haunts his erotic imagination.
First published in 1978, before the trilogy of frankly autobiographical novels that made him famous, Nocturnes for the King of Naples reveals Edmund White at his most poetic, playful, and evocative, a magician on the level of James Salter, James Merrill, or Vladimir Nabokov.
Selected Praise
“The most gorgeous evocation I have ever read of the 1970s gay male nighttown at New York’s old rotting piers, a twisted, rusting, metallic ruin of anonymous sex and unexpectedly sublime tableaus. I wanted to go there—not to the piers, where girls wouldn’t have been welcome anyway, but to the mind-set that apprehended the world that way, as an abundant, carnal and glittering place, populated by fearless, libidinal aesthetes.”
—Stacey D’Erasmo, New York Times Book Review
“[A] near perfect poetic effusion disguised as a novel, [written] in the voice of a younger man who rejects a sophisticated, well-traveled, and widely-admired older lover.”
—Nick Radel, Gay and Lesbian Review
“There are few novels which defy reviewing. They are the ones that provide us with unique reading experiences, which become valuable additions to understanding of the world and ourselves. Edmund White’s new novel is one of these . . . Some of the finest writing to be found in recent American fiction.”
—Doris Grumbach, Washington Post Book World
“A baroque invention of quite startling brilliance and intensity.”
—Gore Vidal
“Artful vignettes from a life passed between Bohemian and cafe societies, in Italy and Spain, on a decaying American estate, on the New York piers . . . It is exquisite prose, gooey and fantastic as Italian pastry, mounds of it, piled on prodigally. Elegant plays on words abound . . . Proust, for a possible comparison, piled phrase upon phrase, hoping by the addition of each to hone an interpretation finer . . . Mr. White [is] a similar virtuoso . . . Nocturnes is a set of delicious . . . prose poems by a writer of great talent and high art.”
—John Yohalem, New York Times
“White’s disarmingly gorgeous prose everywhere works transformations . . . Banal gestures become lavishly, ravishingly beautiful, making drama of perception . . . Some of the book’s mysteries remain unsoundable, at least for me, which is a quality I prize: one can return again and again, to the inexhaustible text . . . This edition provides an opportunity for a new and better reading of White’s second novel, one that sees its importance not just as an historic record or an essential document of a crucial career, but as a psychological study of complexity and depth, and a stylistic performance of an immaculacy seldom achieved.”
—Garth Greenwell, from the Foreword
“One of America’s outstanding prose writers today, as a master of language and imagination.”
—Jordan Elgrably, Paris Review
“An astonishing technical achievement in its confident reconceptualization of the mordant form of devotional literature, with its second-person ("you") narration.”
—Richard Canning, Gay and Lesbian Review
“A long, soliliquous address—craftily modulated into different moody keys and directed to a dead, charismatic, anonymous lover whom the narrator had the callowness and bad fortune to throw over for someone else . . .Witty and cultured.”
—Kirkus Reviews
About the Author
Edmund White was born in Cincinnati in 1940. His many novels include the autobiographical trilogy A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, and The Farewell Symphony; he has published biographies of Jean Genet, Marcel Proust, and Arthur Rimbaud, as well as memoirs, short stories, and criticism; in 1977 he co-authored The Joy of Gay Sex. He is an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He lives in New York City.
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