The Beautiful Room Is Empty: A Novel (Lambda Literary Award)

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.

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!

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.

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

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.