Edmund White’s 11th novel seems, on the surface, to be a rewriting of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. A gorgeous young French model, Guy, arrives “from Paris to New York in the late 1970s when he was in his late 20s but passed as 19”. Throughout the novel, this agelessness – even when he is pushing 40, people take him to be at least 15 years younger – is an inescapable note, sounded over and over again. Even Guy, not the most intellectual character you’ll encounter in a novel, is aware of the literary allusion: towards the very end, in a rare moment of feeling sick of his “eternal” beauty, he thinks, “What if he were stripped of his looks, if he stabbed the grotesque painting in the attic?” But in a book as beguilingly treacherous and deceptive as Our Young Man, this referencing of Wilde seems a calculated indirection: impishly turning our attention towards the obvious, while subtler, weightier matters churn on elsewhere. I imagine White setting himself the challenge, “Is it possible to write a profound book set in the fashion world that will replicate the lightness of that world itself?” and then running triumphantly with it. Even the title has a doubleness to it: in the end, you will be asking yourself whether “our young man” is Guy, who is no longer young, or Kevin, Guy’s wholesome, serious, all‑American lover from Minnesota, who is in his early 20s when he graduates from Columbia in the final chapter of the novel.

But Kevin doesn’t appear until the halfway mark. Before him, Guy first ensnares a wealthy old Belgian baron, Édouard, with a penchant for masochistic sex, who gifts Guy a brownstone in Greenwich Village in return for the pleasure of being sexually subordinated by the beautiful Frenchman just once. In an uproarious scene of sadomasochistic practices in a West End dungeon, Guy torpedoes any chances he may have had as a longer-term beneficiary of the baron’s largesse. Guy’s next conquest is Fred, an American man who has left his wife and grownup sons to come out in his 60s. Fred leaves him a house on Fire Island before he dies of an Aids-related illness. For neither of these men does Guy exactly put out. But with a Colombian art history student, Andrés, the temperature ratchets up several degrees: this is a steamy, obsessive, consuming relationship. However Andrés ends up in prison, and it is during his absence that Guy meets Kevin, one of identical twin brothers.

As the book progresses, Guy’s career as a fashion model ascends dizzy heights. White writes of this world with great humour and knowingness – he used to work for Vogue and counts among his friends the designer Azzedine Alaïa – and while he is clear-eyed about its absurdity, he never descends to savage satire. This open-heartedness, an essential White quality, makes his writing sparkle with generosity even when he is writing about, say, Guy’s monstrously bitchy agent, Pierre-Georges.

White is the most European of living American novelists. We have to look back to Henry James and Edith Wharton, F Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, to find other US writers who travelled to Europe to find their writerly bearings and position themselves on the map of European and Anglophone literary tradition. White lived in Paris for 16 years, a time he writes about in the latest volume of his autobiographical project, 2014’s Inside a Pearl. This novel, while set almost entirely in the United States, can be seen as a fictional companion to the memoir, but the relationship is not straightforward. It lies rather in the conversation that Our Young Man is having with that great theme of those earlier American novelists, the endlessly productive friction in the encounter between the simpler, more innocent new world and the complex, dark, opaque and duplicitous old world.

Characteristically, White inverts the trope: he transplants his European character, Guy, to the US, and in the inevitable comedy-of-manners incarnation that the novel often assumes, one can see a reversal of, say, James’s The American. In Inside a Pearl, White parsed, with immense perception and humour, the disjunctions between US and French cultures. These divergences, and the resultant gaps in understanding, form a wonderful metaphorical underpinning to the novel, too, especially in its sustained exploration of the ramifications of what it means for a novel to have a central character who is described as “a black hole in space”.

Every detail is alive and gleaming, from “a big, standing wreath of red and white carnations and a blue silk ribbon stretched across its empty thorax”, to the “nostrils black as raisins” in photographs of Rudolph Valentino, to the “anti-nostalgia” mental training Guy puts himself through to deceive people into thinking he is young. While so inexorably tethered to materiality, it is also a book that floats above things, so light is its touch, so playful and joyous its execution. Even the onset of Aids (known initially as GRID: Gay-Related Immune Deficiency), a time White has recorded with extraordinary clarity and with the chronicler’s unflinching truthfulness, in both his fiction and his autobiographical works, is played in the comic mode. As Fred lies dying, he jokes of making the first Aids movie, “with two hot young studs dying”. “The lead would have to lose 30 pounds for the last three minutes.”

In a way it goes against one of the two presiding spirits of this Janus-faced book that it should be written about seriously – one could dwell all too easily on White’s hilarious treatment of models’ weight-loss regimens, or the lovingly detailed and graphic sex, or the anthropology of gay life on Fire Island. It is shameful, though, that we haven’t managed to free White from the initially groundbreaking but now enfettering label of “gay novelist”. It has blinded us to the essential allusiveness, wit and sprezzatura of his work, its conversations with other books, its effortless ability to say profound things in unsententious and gossamer-light ways. Ultimately, a question Kevin asks after he has read Guy’s farewell letter to him, is one that returns the reader to contemplate the morality of the novel form itself. “He felt older and wiser – but in what way wiser?”

• Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others is published by Vintage. To order Our Young Man for £15.19 (RRP £18.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.