Forgetting Elena

**From the New York Times Book Review:**

Was it Wilkie Collins who wrote the first detective novel? I'm inclined to think detective fiction may be older, the oldest vehicle for the novel, the necessary form. Who exactly is Tom Jones; what is Mr. Rochester's secret; what sort of fellow can this Osmond be? These are mysteries to be solved, and their solutions, chapter by chapter, generate novels. It is the reader who plays private investigator throughout--as in fact he does in the standard detective novel--sifting through the author's clues and relishing the evidence. As he grows more wily, his first question, "What is Ahab up to?," changes into "What is Melville up to?" He reads "The Trial" and Kafka becomes a principal suspect, his work a plot. Each new novel by Nabokov, Robbe-Grillet or Gass implicitly dares readers to match wits with the author's deception. We grow more cunning, they more devious.

This nearly inscrutable mystery by Edmund White is a Chinese puzzle. The East of its setting is our own East Coast, but also, subtly, the Orient. On page after page the ancient classics of the East underlie the text. The chinoiserie of the narrator's hard, gemlike style is at all points poetically controlled. And his story is told with a trompe-l'oeil realism that evaporates--while we are looking right at it--into the thin air of a charade: an Oriental court ritual.