The impressionistic novel is getting a new lease on life from Edmund White, whose dreamy "Forgetting Elena" had a success of esteem some years back, and who in his second novel has abandoned such concessions to the reader as linear storytelling.

"Nocturnes" is a series of apostrophes to a nameless, evidently famous dead lover, a man who awakened the much younger, also nameless narrator not to sexuality … but to the possibilities of sexual friendship. Though he well remembers why he found it stifling and why he fled, it was an experience that the narrator feels he did not justly appreciate and that he has long and passionately—and fruitlessly—sought to replace on his own terms.

The matter is not quite a catalogue … but a series of self-consciously artful vignettes from a life passed between Bohemian and cafe societies, in Italy and Spain, on a decaying American estate...