Just listen to the exquisite black and brown queer kids cavorting about Christopher Street tell you how to read: “Anybody in this world can be read,” 22-year-old Maliek Wynn of Brooklyn said to me. “You read somebody to throw shade — in a bad and good way. You’re tellin’ someone about themselves. Tellin’ everything — left, right, up, down, inside, out. And it’s an education behind the telling. That’s why it’s a read.” 

Hilton Als, in the fierce style of street reading and the formal tradition of critical inquiry, reads culture, race and gender in his new essay collection, “White Girls.” Here, reading becomes psychoanalytic self-exhibition, complete with insights on identity, sexuality, voice and the attainment of knowledge. He also reads the white girls who love so many queers, but could always love more.

And what’s not to love? Young and recently dumped, a lovesick Als flees his family’s cramped Brooklyn apartment to visit the fashion-industry icon Diana Vreeland on Martha’s Vineyard during the summer of 1981. Vreeland, in white shift and straw hat, greets the ingénue as he gets off the boat: “Come on, let’s go to the supermarket and get a chicken.” 
 
A gay black man, Als portrays gay black men’s longing to cherish what they cannot sexually love, the putative opposite of themselves, yet the emblem with which they deeply identify: white girls. Als admires and loathes white girls, mocks and mimics white girls, is ignored by white girls, is depended on by white girls, is perceived to be a white girl. “White  girls,” he shows, is not just literal people. It’s a state of mind, an art of being. 


Witness, in one essay, the black drag queen wearing jeans, a halter top and an upswept hairdo, who plunks herself on the lap of an older white gentleman and announces: “That’s what I want you to make me feel like, baby, a white woman. A white woman who’s getting out of your Mercedes-Benz and going into Gucci to buy me some new drawers because you wrecked them. Just fabulous.” 

Als owns up to the sadomasochistic nature of white-girl worship. Watching “Gone With the Wind” for the first time, he fell in love with Vivien Leigh, who as Scarlett “suffers, and says she will never suffer again, and I loved her so much I didn’t want her to suffer.” He adds, “I would have made her forget that I was colored and that she could lynch me if she wanted to because I knew I could make her love me.” 

 



 Hilton Als




 

 A staff writer for The New Yorker, Als knits together profiles of white girls across history from Louise Brooks to Michael Jackson. Truman Capote became a white girl in 1947, when the dust-jacket photograph for “Other Voices, Other Rooms” was taken. Lounging on a divan, he devours the camera with his eyes. By asserting himself as “the most famous woman author — not writer, an important distinction — of his generation,” Als writes, Capote temporarily thwarted certain women from achieving equally deserved success. 

Capote’s come-hither publicity still isn’t all that made him a white girl. In the 1950s, Norman Mailer called him “as tart as a grand aunt,” and Capote shamelessly appropriated the voices — the syntax, the style — of well-known women also “generally perceived as maiden aunts” (Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers). But the publication of “In Cold Blood” marked his reversion to manhood. A “big” book in the male nonfiction tradition, it transformed Capote from a “lyrical authoress” into a serious author-adventurer “validated by his experience in the world of fact.” 

Als’s careful read on Capote doubles as a mind-popping take on white girls generally. He exposes the funny and calculated fissures that can open between the white-girl self we’re shown and the white-girl self we cannot know, the slipperiness of white girls as shackled objects of desire and matrices of power. Nearly all his other literary readings glisten with this panache. 

Als’s most cutting work is inflicted on a big white girl, the former Vogue editor André Leon Talley, “who seeks always to live up to the grand amalgamation of his three names.” When Als announces early on that Talley’s speech “combines an old-school Negro syntax, French words (for sardonic emphasis) and a posh British accent,” one knows the profile will get even saucier. Als portrays Talley as a token prop for the (public) exploitation and (private) ridicule of white fashion elites. Yes, he demonstrates, Talley clumsily performs his black drag for competitive advantage. But so what? Talley isn’t the only walking cartoon in the industry. Most fashion celebrities do shtick in a desperate scramble to stand out. Als’s larger point about race and the culture industry is well taken, though this particular illustration is rather personal and mean. 

Any worthy reading of race and gender must cut to the core — to their deep attachments and vernacular. Does a white girl’s soul ever feel the way a black man sounds? If you listen to Flannery O’Connor or Michael Jackson, yes. If you listen to Als, certainly. 

His resulting critique of whiteness is effort­less, honest and fearless. He doesn’t afford whites any unwitting reverence, nor any hip, posturing disdain. Some of his remarks on race and sexuality — so original and mordant — may offend the mullahs of pious multicultural liberalism (and will certainly offend conservatives). Als floats outside political and cultural orthodoxies, and this independence, this integrity, gives “White Girls” much of its charm. 

At times, however, a maddening attention deficit hamstrings the collection, which is mostly composed of previously published work. Concluding the long chapter “Tristes Tropiques,” Als takes the reader to his beloved Diana Vreeland’s deathbed as a means of excavating his own soul; he then abruptly pivots to commentary on the documentary film “The Central Park Five” and an excoriation of the “two white women” who prosecuted the Central Park jogger rape case and “trafficked in lies that helped destroy a number of lives.” Come again? Fused so haphazardly, each reflection competes and becomes truncated, and thus deflated. “White Girls” offers more than a few juxtapositions like this, Als stepping on his own toes. 

The essay in which Als impersonates Richard Pryor’s sister, a failed actress doing voice-overs for pornography who trash-talks Virginia Woolf, begins as an invigorating commentary on women’s invisibility, abandonment and voice, but degenerates into a mess. “I know, being colored, I’m not supposed to exist in the realm of ideas,” the imagined sister says, “my skin would dirty them up” — a sentiment expressed ad nauseam and more powerfully elsewhere in the book’s previous 200 pages. By the time this essay’s “revelation” lands — multiple characters and 39 pages in — we’re exhausted. 

Als comes across as a critic who has mastered nuance and observation but not discipline or moderation. An orgy — or gluttony — of insights overwhelms these pages. Understood: The essays, written with raw and poetic erudition, are delivered to challenge minds, to frustrate prejudice and expectation. Clearly, Als is writing against the essay’s depletion as a genre. Yet how bizarre to read so many thought-jewels delivered in such perfect prose, scattered across such sloppy form. 

In one of the book’s choicest moments, Als gushes over “The Times Square Show,” the 1980 group exhibition of avant-garde artists that helped kick off Jean-Michel Basquiat’s career. The show, Als explains, “combined the refined and the dissolute: how perfect was that, since New York was a disaster area then so why couldn’t an exhibition be a disaster area, too?” The same can be said of “White Girls,” which blends the cultivated and the vulgar with interpretive sophistication and unbridled verve. Als’s prose is sterling precision, his head a disaster area, a wretched, beautiful self-exhibition you can’t wrest your eyes from. The critic has been read. 

Rich Benjamin is the author of “Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America.”