Chaos by Edmund White

The novella which begins Chaos sets the tone for the rest of the collection: Jack is an ageing writer, passively observing as his life trickles away and his fame, memory and bank balance dwindle. In one respect, he's still the man he always was, harbouring ambitions "to have sex with every man in the world", but in his paunchy middle years, his options are limited to young men he can pay to passively pleasure. Excitement and true happiness seem confined to memory and fantasy – and not just for Jack, but for the entire cast of the collection. White 's descriptive powers are as sharp as they were when he wrote A Boy's Own Story in 1982, but, like his characters, his tales seem to have lost some of their old energy.