Customer Reviews

The Beautiful Room Is Empty

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is the majestic second autobiographical novel by Edmund White, told with such elegent honesty that one is simply entranced by each scene.

I don't believe that this novel is better in any arguable way than A Boy's Own Story. The first book in White's autobiographical series is just as serious, but less enjoyable, simply because adolescence is SO much more interesting (for me at least) than the childhood White dealt with before. Both books illustrate (with great candor!) their respective periods of life (and the author's specific grappling). But it's just that this is when it "gets good" for me, when the protagonist is more sophisticated.

Edmund White paints with honesty a believable portrait of life as he has lived it. Of course, his own experiences differ significantly from certain scenes in his novels, but nonetheless, he writes with blunt honesty, which is often the way we experience life: bluntly. A quote characteristic of White:

"Because a novel -these words- is a shared experience, a clumsy but sometimes funny conversation between two people in which one of them is doing all the talking, it will always be tighter and more luminous than that object called living. There is something so insipid about living that to do it at all requires heroism or stupidity, probably both. Living is all those days and years, the rushes; memory edits them; this page is the final print, music added. But for an instant imagine the process reversed, go with me back through the years, then be me, me all alone as I submit to the weight, the atomospheric pressure of youth, for when I was young I was exhausted by always bumping up against this big lummox I didn't really know, myself."

White has a flair for the everyday things. He makes them seem beautiful, horrible; they are the little things, and this author writes them down in their warts-and-all glory.

A previous reviewer said that reading this book is much like experiencing a grand opera while sitting in the bathroom, "a darkly exciting, unorthodox and revealing artistic encounter that one would curiously find oneself wanting to revisit". It's a very insightful comment and best tells the potential reader what he awaits.

Edmund White's prose will sweep you along to relive part of his youth along with him. I can say nothing more but read this book!

Reading Edmund White's work is, I suppose, what experiencing grand opera in a latrine would probably be like - a darkly exciting, unorthodox and revealing artistic encounter that one would curiously find oneself wanting to revisit. 'The Beautiful Room Is Empty' - like its successor 'The Farewell Symphony' - is sumptuous, exquisitely paced and compels its possessed possessor to gluttonously read and re-read its skilfully connected, intricately descriptive, abjectly human and majestically imaginative scenes.

Xen Andreas

Edmund White's 'Beautiful Room' is a moving, wonderful story, crafted around the late teens to late twenties of the narrator, known only as 'Bunny' to his friend Lou, one of the many lively, memorable characters encountered along the way, as well as Tex, a flaboyant bookstore owner, who gives 'Bunny' his earliest education in 'gay slang.'

'Bunny', at the beginning of the novel, is a prep-school student coming to terms with his homosexuality, by engaging in anonymous sexual encounter after encounter in the boy's bathrooms, where his lovers are seen only from waistline to knees. He dresses and plays the part of the dutiful prep school student by day, but once class is out, he drifts toward the bohemians, gracing the coffee shops of their 1950's and 60's lives, watching them paint, sharing their surrealist literature and poetry, and secretly lusting after the males. A child of divorced parents, his father determined to make a man out of him, his mother convinced that all he needs is a cure, the narrator carries us along on his ride, meeting many notable characters along the way, that shape and influence his gradual acceptance that he is gay.

Following his school years, when he enters the work force and the real world, the words of a school-friend come back to haunt him, that 'some day he will have too much freedom,' freedom to choose where he goes, what he does, and who he is. He drifts along from job to job, from lover to lover, Lou, Fred, and the frequent pick-ups from Christoper Street, until he meets Sean, a closeted young man who leads 'Bunny' to question his own identity as they both enter group therapy to try and overcome their 'illness' and go straight, with very different results.

Culminating at the famous Stonewall site, Edmund White provides readers with a grand tour-de-force of growing up gay in the 50's and 60's in Chicago and New York.

Sometimes poignant, sometimes emotional, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, 'Beautiful Room' is a beautiful book, with a beautiful story to tell. The narrator, presumably White himself, as the book is supposed to be autobiographical, slips from identity to identity as he tries to find his own. Young and unsure of himself, he tries to be what everyone else wants him to be until he finds himself.

Although this story centers on a gay man, the book speaks volumes to anyone struggling to find their own identity, and the choices and mistakes we all make along the way.

The Beautiful Room is Empty by Edmund White is a wonderful additon to the inspired A Boy's Own Story. It is not exactly a sequel but it does loosely form the middle in a semi-autobiographical trilogy (between A Boy's Own Story and A Farewll Symphony). All can be read and enjoyed on their own but also fit together smoothly to take the reader through different times in the life of a gay man. This volume takes the reader from the repressive fifties into the time of Stonewall as the main character grows from a young man in the midwestern college into a gay urbanite going to the gym. The growth of the narrator is more honest and well written than in many gay novels and will resonate with the reader with painful or humourous , at different times, recognition whether he grew up in that era or not. It is a fine novel that plays all the right notes.

This book is the second in the trilogy beginning with A Boy's Own Story and ending with The Farewell Symphony. To get the full impact,read them in sequence.White is one of the finest writers on his subjects, both in language and content. The era of the 60's from the buttoned down end of the Eisenhower era to the Stonewall Uprising are compellingly seen through one man's eyes. (White was a participant in Stonewall and the book ends on that note.)Read this book and you will learn or remember a lot.

Being in a mood of reverence for Edmund White's biographies of Jean Genet and Marcel Proust and having enjoyed "The Married Man", I have returned to White's career-making novels and find that they not only withstand the test of time, they are indeed truly even finer novels than remembered. "The Beautiful Room Is Empty" is the best summation of the agonies of growing into adulthood and finding that niche of destiny as any book around. But not only is this one man's journey to self acceptance, it is a journal of sociologic change that peaked in the Stonewall Bar and forever changed the way sexuality is viewed, lived and accepted. White's descriptive powers are at their peak as is his ability to draw characters so believeable that they seem like old personal acquaintances. And they are that....for those who met them in 1988 when this book first burst on the scene. This is history, psychology, a dissection and appreciation about Love all eloquently and entertainingly told by a master craftsman!

Ranked 63 on the 100 best Gay and Lesbian books list. I decided to pick it up thinking it seemed interesting. I had never read anything by White. In short, I was so pleasently surprised. I had tried to read some of his work previously but it seemed quite overwrought. The character in this book (like in any great book) come to life and you (the reader) feel they are tangible / that they exist. As it ends on the night of the Stonewall upriseing I had goosebumps, chills...Some books are so powerful with the feeling they give you. This is one of those books.

This is the second book in an autobiographical-fiction trilogy by Edmund White. The first book, A Boy's Own Story--was an amazing read, but this sequel turned out to be even better. This picks up shortly after ABOS left off, and continues right up through the riots at Stonewall. I cannot tell you any better about the plot, because, like life in the span it covers, it consists of a great many events. The mood of the book is absorbing, and as beatiful as the tittle ("The Beautiful Room is Empty" is one of the best titles I've heard, along with those like "Silence of the Lambs" and "Something Wicked This Way Comes.") It is also an essential work--as all of White's are--in understanding gay literature. White is truly one of the best writers the genre has ever seen, and will be one of the fathers and inspirations of what will come later.

Edmund White's "The Beautiful Room Is Empty" is an impressive coming of age novel of how young gay bohemians in the arts and literary circle struggled furtively with their secret and self acceptance long before they had the confidence that came with political recognition as a minority group in liberal America to emerge from the closet. So, it shouldn't surprise us to find the narrator and his friends coping with their own sexual condition as a malady, each unconsciously but surely searching for a cure to restore himself to the mainstream. Indeed, with parents like the unnamed narrator's, who can blame them for developing a complex ? The protagonist worries that he isn't thin or handsome enough. His friend, Sean, suspects he isn't intelligent enough. Even Maria, the jokey intellectual, finds herself on shaky grounds, flitting from being a radical activist one day and a sloganeering feminist the next. She only lets her mask slip when she falls briefly in love with Maeve. What's clear is that despite the honesty they uphold with each other, they're in denial over their "condition". That's why the spectacle of young gay males lining up at public toilets (even school toilets) to indulge their fetish is both sad and funny. That's also why there's an unmistakably celebratory feel about the coming out of the narrator's sister during more progressive times. In her own words, "there's nothing secure about suffering". The novel ends on a pregnant note of expectation, with the uprising at Stonewall Tavern marking the beginning of the gay movement to gain political rights for itself as a minority group. White is both humourous and serious and his intimate understanding of the subject lends a special authenticity to his writing. "The Beautiful Room Is Empty" may be the second of a three part trilogy but it succeeds well enough on its own. I haven't read either the prequel or sequel but those who have seem to find it even better.

White is clearly one of the finest prosaists in the last half of the 20th C. America. His mellifluous writing and lucid exposition have earned him the wide respect that he deserves.

"The Beautiful Room is Empty" is a sequel to his earlier "A Boy's Own Story," the evolving process of coming-out gay in the Sixties. The first novel scouts the adolescent years; this novel covers early adulthood. Much has changed in the way that people come-out today, versus the time when being gay was stigmatized by everybody. Curing homosexuality was seen as viable by both the queer himself and by the anti-queer establishment. Fortunately, while coming-out may still be a demanding process, it is far less traumatic than a few score ago, because of these earlier pioneers.

In an almost plotless chronicle of coming-out, the focus is on the author's first-person's introspection of dealing with himself and the gay world as it was then. The ways in which people connected were far more convoluted, clandestine, and often illegal. It wasn't much of a life, until the Stonewall riots liberated gays from their false imprisonment. It not only opened new avenues by which to meet and socialize, but it also rejected the premise that gays should be neither heard nor seen. The toll these older restrictions had on men and women must have been truly appalling, causing much externalized homophobia to turn inward.

To see how far the GLBT community has come in the past 40 years is itself a witness to these earlier pioneers. We owe it to them to hear their story, especially when it's this well-told.