Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without Gutenberg?

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today, my guest is Edmund White.

His new book is Jack Holmes and his friend.

I've made a resolution.

Actually, it was a New Year's resolution in regard to Ed White.

For years now, every time I see him, I scald him for not writing the way he did with his first two novels.

And I've decided it's time to stop, 18 books later, and praise him for

the smoothness, the delicacy, the flow of his writing, which in Jack Holmes and his friend

is at its best. I wanted to ask you, Edmund, this book is really a book that celebrates

the dailiness of friendship. How do you manage to get that tone?

I think it must be inadvertent. In other words, I'm somebody who has a lot of friends, and I stand by my friends a lot.

I mean, they're really my family. And so I think writing about friendship is very natural for me.

I'm always surprised when people, like my English agent, Deborah Rogers, will say,

oh, you're so good on friendship. And I think, well,

isn't everybody? I mean, it isn't something I picked out as a quality to emphasize.

Well, in the course of the book, one of the two heroes, this is a novel about the friendship

between a gay man and a straight man over decades of friendship. Both of

...