The Beautiful Room Is Empty: A Novel
by Edmund White
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Book Summary Information
Author: Edmund WhiteEdition: Paperback
Published: 1994-10-04
ISBN: 0679755403
Number of pages: 240
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of The Beautiful Room Is Empty: A Novel
Book Review: Construction of gay identity
Summary: 5 Stars
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.
Summary of The Beautiful Room Is Empty: A Novel
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
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