What is it about male gay writers that makes sexual craving and gratification such an all-consuming obsession for them? "By the time I was sixteen," Edmund White declares, "I'd probably been to bed with several hundred people," adding, in the same 1992 interview: "I do think sex is something worth dying for."
We are all, of course, driven by our sexuality - whether in the pursuit, expression, frustration or denial of it - and perhaps a writer like Edmund White is simply being more honest about it than the majority of us choose to be. And no doubt for gays, the spectre and reality of AIDS inevitably link sex and death in a way that most heterosexuals don't have to confront, or even imagine.
Yet it's difficult not to demur - not to argue that an over-emphasis on sexual desire and fulfilment is to belittle those variously complicated and mysterious and fascinating other things that make us what we are: things not reducible to the catalogue of anonymous couplings in bath houses that some gay writers, whether by design or unintended distortion, convey as the essence of their world.
White, an urbane, elegant and interesting writer (as anyone who's read A Boy's Own Story or The Burning Library will know), isn't one of those, and he has written with wit, insight and feeling, not just about the gay experience, but about other things also. Yet he hasn't always avoided the trap common among those who, reluctantly or otherwise, find themselves cast as spokespeople for marginalised groups: the presentation of their world as somehow the only world, exclusive and maybe even superior in its private codes and elite membership to the world that those who aren't eligible to enlist in it are compelled to inhabit.
Perhaps that's just a heterosexual's paranoia in the face of something he doesn't entirely understand and from which, by an accident of nature, he feels rebuffed, but we are all human at the end (and beginning) of the day, and surely a writer's job is to make our common humanity accessible to each other, whether we are gay or straight, black or white, male or female.
Still, White is an absorbing writer (even if he's wrong about sex being worth dying for), and he deserves better than the fanzine idolatry that characterises Stephen Barber's approach and the stew of overheated superlatives that mark his prose style. The subject's story gets told, but the writing is so luridly over-excited that the reader isn't given room to breathe or time to reflect.
This is a great pity because a less fevered, more discriminating account would make something truly arresting of White's life - from his conservative, middle-class Cincinnati upbringing, his hedonistic and heady early manhood in New York, his investigative travels among gay communities throughout America in the 1970s, his 16 years domiciled in Paris (where he still lives), and the deaths of friends and lovers from AIDS.
The chronicling of these dyings does move the reader, especially the section on Hubert Sorin, a handsome, married young teacher whom White met in Paris in 1989 and who became his lover not long afterwards - they were together until Sorin finally died from an AIDS-related heart attack while holidaying with White in Morocco in 1994. The facts have their own poignancy, but mostly the reader is defeated by Barber's awful prose. On the opening page we're told that White's work "roars and blazes with words and images", that it "exhales with ecstasy, and delicately burns with joy and with fury" (delicate fury, no less) and that his life has been "one long and astonishing journey, ricocheting from city to city".
Three pages later we're informed that "White's life has been one vast incitement to friendship" and "has run headlong into every other kind of human life", whatever that means. The writing doesn't improve as the book proceeds and the wonder is that White, a genuine stylist, afforded "absolute access" to this biographer.
John Boland is a journalist and critic