Adam Phillips

If it is too often said about Diane Arbus that she photographs freaks, it does at least suggest that we know what normal people are like, what people look like when they are not odd. It is reassuring to be reminded that we know a freak when we see one. There are, of course, points of view, angles from which we can all look like freaks to ourselves; and Arbus is unusually eloquent about this...

Bret Easton Ellis has always been interested in the ways in which people don’t pay attention, and in the cost of attention when it is paid. In the comédie humaine he has been writing since 1985, when his first novel, Less than Zero, was published, his characters, who recur throughout the books, are as torpid and enervated as Balzac’s are driven and determined. Balzac’s heroes and heroines – and indeed his minor characters – always want to make their presence felt; hope makes them demonic. Ellis’s characters, by contrast, are always trying to absent themselves from their own and other people’s lives. They are bizarre and clever and deadpan witty, but these are the ways they have of curing themselves of hope, of nipping it in the bud. American Psycho (1991), in many ways Ellis’s subtlest novel, begins with the words ‘Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here,’ ‘scrawled in blood-red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank’.

It is conventional for people now to have lives rather than a life, but it is not always clear whose lives they are. They can, of course, be claimed – you can call them, as Edmund White does in this autobiography, ‘my lives’ – but there are always counter-claims. What seemed most intimately one’s own can turn out to have been someone else’s all along. Being possessive doesn’t make one self-possessed, and White makes great play in this fascinating and archly mischievous book with ideas of ownership, sexual and otherwise. By calling his first chapter ‘My Shrinks’, and the following chapters ‘My Father’, ‘My Mother’, ‘My Hustlers’, ‘My Women’, ‘My Europe’, ‘My Master’, ‘My Blonds’, ‘My Genet’, ‘My Friends’, he keeps reminding us that his story about himself is always a story about other people. And that most of these other people, beginning, naturally, with his parents (and with his shrinks), were so self-absorbed that the young Edmund could never really make them his. He was involved but never included; he was always part of someone else’s project and grew up – turning a predicament into a wish – craving the desire of others. He ‘wanted to be indispensable’, and his parents’ high-maintenance egotism left him with a virtual passion for what he calls passivity. ‘His words,’ he says of one of his hustlers, ‘gave me an instant erection – the bliss of total passivity edged with the fear of total passivity.’ It would not be true to say that White’s autobiography is mostly about other people; but what fascinates him about other people is the nature of their self-regard, the ways in which they are caught up in who they want to be.

‘Just as the pearl is the oyster’s affliction,’ Flaubert wrote in a letter in 1852, ‘so style is perhaps the discharge from a deeper wound.’ It is an arresting image, not because it was news then that the artist was in some way a wounded soul – someone whose suffering was the source and inspiration of his art – but because we would expect the wound to...

Malingering, the OED tells us, is something originally done by the armed forces: ‘To pretend illness, or to produce or protract illness, in order to escape duty; said esp. of soldiers and sail-ors.’ To avoid conscription (the first usage is recorded in 1820), or to escape the horrors of what the military authorities have referred to since at least the 17th century as...