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Title: The Beautiful Room Is Empty : A Novel by Edmund White ISBN: 0-679-75540-3 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 04 October, 1994 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.73 (15 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: A Satisfying Addition
Comment: 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.
Rating: 5
Summary: The Beautiful Room is Empty
Comment: 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.
Rating: 5
Summary: The Beautiful Room
Comment: 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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Title: A Boy's Own Story by Edmund White ISBN: 0375707409 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 30 May, 2000 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: The Farewell Symphony by Edmund White ISBN: 0679754768 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 01 September, 1998 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Swimming Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst ISBN: 0679722564 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 19 September, 1989 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Dancer from the Dance : A Novel by Andrew Holleran ISBN: 0060937068 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 18 December, 2001 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: A Better Place : by Mark A. Roeder ISBN: 0595171761 Publisher: Writers Club Press Pub. Date: 20 February, 2001 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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