Product Description

Moving with sinuous ease from a claustrophobic Midwestern college town in the 1950s to Greenwich Village on the night of the Stonewall rebellion, Edmund White's poised yet scalding autobiographical novel is a portrait of the artist as a young gay man finding his way within a country that has no room for sexual dissidents.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #490852 in Books
• Published on: 1994-10-04
• Released on: 1994-10-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

From Publishers Weekly
This sequel to A Boy's Own Story is a satisfying successor to that acclaimed 1982 novel, taking the narrator through the 1950s and '60s as he matures as a gay man at the University of Michigan and later in New York. Some of White's previous fiction (Forgetting Elena, Caracole) has been considered opaque and inaccessible, but his discursive stylea modified stream of consciousness that leans luxuriantly and effectively on metaphor and simileaptly suits A Boy's Own Story and this novel, both books of memory, never too tightly plotted, but always revelatory of character and milieu as a wise narrator dissects his past and the web of his relationships with family, lovers and friends. Life in the novel is life as it is remembered, and the two novels form the lyrical but politically pointed fictional autobiography of a homosexual recalling his youth (in A Boy's Own Story) and, in this novel, the last years of psychological self-oppression and the first sweet years of liberation. White's gift for dialogue and anecdote and the melancholy elegance of his prose (often at odds with the spiteful tone the narrator takes) persuade the reader to suspend judgment as the author suspends time, to move with the narrator back and forth between past and deeper past, to delve deeper inside the soul of a man whose spiritual and sexual odysseys chart the development and joyfully confirm the existence of the elusive notion of "gay sensibility."
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
White, generally recognized as one of the most influential of modern gay authors, continues the coming-of-age tale begun in a Boy's Own Story ( LJ 9/1/82). He follows our nameless hero from his final year at prep school in the mid-1950s through his cruisy but self-deprecating college years to the "turning point" in his lifethe famous Stonewall uprising of 1969 in which the clients of a New York gay bar stood up to the policemen trying to close it down. What emerges is the picture of a young man desperately struggling to come to terms with himself, a struggle that is a universal even if the context for every individual is different. Artfully constructed, this work clearly transcends its "gay" theme. Explicit at times, it remains highly recommended. David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, Fl.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From the Inside Flap
When the narrator of White's poised yet scalding autobiographical novel first embarks on his sexual odyssey, it is the 1950s, and America is "a big gray country of families on drowsy holiday." That country has no room for a scholarly teenager with guilty but insatiable stirrings toward other men. Moving from a Midwestern college to the Stonewall Tavern on the night of the first gay uprising--and populated by eloquent queens, butch poseurs, and a fearfully incompetent shrink--The Beautiful Room is Empty conflates the acts of coming out and coming of age.

"With intelligence, candor, humor--and anger--White explores the most insidious aspects of oppression.... An impressive novel."--Washington Post book World

Customer Reviews

Construction of gay identity
Edmund White writes beautifully and this narrative is flowing, interesting, and compelling. White writes as if he is developing a 1980 memoire about the 1960s. But at the core of this novel is a dilemma that is never fully answered in the novel and is probably never really answered in the lives of gay men and women. Other reviews and reviewers do an excellent job of telling the narrative details of this novel, but underneath this narrative is a question regarding identify and identity development.

The basic question is whether gay men are born gay and thus they come out through a process of ever more intense and meaningful gay experiences and friendships and relationships with a broad cast of characters or whether gay men learn to be gay and take on a gay identity through emersion into various relationships with significant persons who teach the youth how to be gay. The brilliance of The Beautiful Room is Empty is that White is able to weave both of these concepts together into a whole cloth of experience, never fully answering whether the power of the instinctual sexual identity is paramount and is revealed in a series of vignetts and character studies with friends and lovers or whether the passion and identity are more diffuse and coagulate around core external experiences where gay identity is learned and reinforced. Both are deterministic models, whether it be a biological determinism or a social structural determinism. Internal reality is always checked against external reality in White's narrative. The drive to sexual expression is the impetus toward self discovery in much of the book, rather than a less sophisticated approach wereby sexual expression is taken as just one component of a series of relationships.

Overall the book is a very good read, shocking in some parts as public bathroom sex is described, but always about an unfolding reality that is heavily influenced by events and relationships.

Eloquent Coming-Out Experience
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.

The Beautiful Room
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.