Hotel de Dream, by Edmund White(Bloomsbury 2007) "Stephen Crane is writing a book, and it may be his last. The year is 1900." Together, the first two short sentences on the fly cover of Edmund White's new novel Hotel de Dream accurately if obliquely semaphore what's to come. White populates his latest book with a mixture of real and fictional characters, sometimes seen through the eyes of Crane, a real American writer who, after years of social exile in England, is taken to Europe in a desperate attempt to cure his terminal tuberculosis by his doting and colourful wife. Crane is writing a book about characters he both loves and despises. There's another hint about what this book is about... lives lived on an edge, or a precipice. Hovering on the fine line between life and the abyss. The 19th century is likewise in its terminal stages, with technology and social change accelerating. Nothing can be as it was. Nothing will be. Adapt or fall by the wayside. Change is inevitable, somehow it must be absorbed and a new life crafted from the fading tattered remnants of the past. Edmund White, himself a noted author with a literary back-catalogue which includes biographies and novels, magnificently draws these two styles of writing together in Hotel de Dream, producing a novel that begins slowly, with a comfortable pace and relaxed characters, but which gradually picks up a head of steam, plunging headlong into a future they, and we, cannot quite see. Sort of like coming out really. And coming out is probably the best analogy for the knife-edges all these characters, real and imagined, are living on. They will either fall back into their old ways or move on to something new and unpredictable. The most tragic will have no choice. For many of its less well-off, New York at the turn of last century was a bloody grim place. Think of the movie version of Gangs of New York with Daniel Day Lewis melodramatically, psychotically, twirling his oily moustachios as he manipulates the unfortunates around him and you start to get the picture. If you have a chance, try reading George Chauncey's excellent Gay New York, particularly the chapters dealing with the decades just before and just after 1900 to get an even better idea of this gay milieu, when young streetwise chaps wore eye makeup to signal their sexual availability, when the earliest gay bars were emerging in the Bowery and other rough, tough parts of the great city. White admits to using Gay New York as research material and it shows, to both books' benefit. Hotel de Dream's characters are sensitively drawn, the young newspaper-hawking street kid is particularly well observed, as is the older married man who is besotted with him. It's a tender little romantic liaison which, given the times and the characters woven throughout this tale, can only end tragically. And this is, repeat is, a tragedy, revealing small lives poignantly balanced between delight and disaster, set against the destabilising influences of big city carnality, the changing times and small unsustainable deceits. The kind of small deceits familiar to any gay man or woman who has hovered apprehensively in indecision before taking the first and irrevocable step of coming out, of stepping out of the comfortable yet constricting past and embracing a new life, what ever it may turn out to have in store. There is no going back. For the tragic yet heartwarming characters of Hotel de Dream, life will never be the same - but whatever it has in store, there will be no turning back. Jay Bennie - 19th October 2007