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: #108927 in Books
• Published on: 1994-10-04
• Released on: 1994-10-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780679755401
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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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.

Review
Sequel to White's autobiographical childhood novel A Boy's Own Story (1982) that carries the nameless narrator from sexual awakening through college and young manhood in Chicago to gay paradise in Greenwich Village. The cloying style that drained A Boy's Own Story and made a glutinous mess of Caracole (1985) is kept under control here. With everything seen in less voluptuous lighting, the new novel reveals itself as a plotless paste-up - with clearly heartfelt but far-from-intriguing description standing in for incident. But just when you think nothing is going to happen, the last quarter of the book achieves an inspired breakthrough. Before then, the narrator's family appears vaguely and threateningly, with Dad going purple with anger about his son's queerness, and with Mom hustling him off to a shrink. The shrink turns out to be sicker than his patients. Meanwhile, the narrator tries to make sexual contact with Maria, a sculptress, who becomes his live-in lesbian buddy - a tie that lacks drama and never achieves the taste of honey it seeks. For a decade the narrator resists his homosexuality while giving in to the most degrading (and lively) cruising and to his compulsion to give quick sex in the college toilets - a compulsion that finally bursts into dramatic fireworks when the narrator lets it carry him to the sexual world of filthy, reeking New York subway toilets during rush hour. From this point on, until Judy Garland's death on the evening of the Stonewall tavern riot, two or three struggling gays take on some weight and breadth but remain minor notes in the saga. So, praise for restraint, especially for the less lyrical style - but, all in all, these scraps are nothing new. (Kirkus Reviews)

Customer Reviews

Magic
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

Relive a writer's hypnotic youth
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!

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.