Call me Edmund: Farewell Symphony

I, Melachi ibn Amillar, being of unsound mind and body, did read Edmund White's book "The Farewell Symphony" (1997), since I liked the title, finishing it in August 2013. It is the story of a man whose main if not only interest throughout the 1960s-80s appears to be other men, and in large numbers. The author never uses one word when he can compose a nicely balanced paragraph instead, and appears greatly concerned with surface effect, referring to high art, philosophy, foreign languages and cultures as though wandering through a great museum, examining the paintings, identifying their schools, and then forgetting them. Like an American who has just completed a Western Civilization course, in fact. There is, to my mind, little depth of philosophy or even psychology. It is hard to imagine so many people can have lived such disassociated lives. As a consequence, there is no plot and not much intentional structure, and the sections about Italy and Paris should have been left out. There is one joke, on page 5 (of 504), though it is quite a good one. They all die at the end, in rather few pages, and this is quite sad, like Moby Dick.