10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Relive a writer's hypnotic youth, September 15, 2000
This review is from: The Beautiful Room Is Empty: A Novel (Paperback)
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!
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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Magic, October 8, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: The Beautiful Room Is Empty: A Novel (Paperback)
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
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Beautiful Room, August 4, 2002
This review is from: The Beautiful Room Is Empty: A Novel (Paperback)
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.
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