A husband and wife decide, after many happy years of marriage, to document secrets from their respective past relationships and read them out to each other. Will this be the stepping stone to greater love, or the catalyst for the destruction of their union?

Ruggero is a 70-something Italian harpsichordist. Constance is his younger American wife. Ruggero is an Italian name meaning ‘famous spear’. Ruggero is virile, proudly wielding his own ‘spear’ frequently.

This is set three decades into the future and Edmund White is a character in his own novel. He is a past lover of Ruggero. The concept of the author appearing as a character isn’t a new literary device but can lead to narcissistic self-indulgence. Not in this case, however. Here, White is the abject, rejected lover – a man of humiliatingly low self-esteem, which made for difficult reading.

Both partners reveal their failed relationships. While this is interesting in that it sets up the narrative for the denouement, it becomes tedious. It seems that the narrative is meandering until the author has the opportunity to write another sex scene … the focus of which tends to be Ruggero’s ‘spear’.

A Previous Life is a disappointing novel from a prolific writer.

Reviewed by Bob Moore

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Edmund Valentine White III is an American novelist, memoirist, playwright, biographer and an essayist on literary and social topics. Since 1999 he has been a professor at Princeton University. France made him Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1993.