The Beautiful Room Is Empty: A Novel Paperback – October 4, 1994

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.

Not his best work, but another great novel by a gay man. Every gay man should read his work to learn about our culture and history.

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.

IN ITS DAY, A VERY BRAVE ACCOUNT. BUT OF LITTLE TO NO ENDURING VALUE. NOT VERY INTERESTING SEX ON ITS MOST PHYSICAL LEVELS.

I read The Beautiful Room is Empty after having read City Boy [by White] which was a memoir. That being the case, it took a little while to get used to a fictional portrait of a boy growing up - a homosexual boy - a 'boy from across the way'. In the Beautiful Room, the narrator went to a Prep School across the way from an Art School, filled with bohemian artists, totally unlike anyone he knew up till then. He reveled in their company, and they enjoyed his.We go with the narrator through various escapades, meet his family and friends. All quite interesting!You always learn something from Edmund White - about growing up homosexual, about life in general, about yourself. Happily he is able to use brilliant writing to produce a "good read".

Life-altering. Simply stellar prose. Edmund White's writing reminds me very much of Karl Ove Knausgaard's _My Struggle_Book Two-- I'm simply amazed at the sheer effortlessness of this man's prose. If you want a novel, whether you are gay or straight, that truly immerses you and whisks you away from the visible world, thoroughly immersing you into a book so thoroughly that you might look up and three or four hours have passed by, unbeknownst to you-- this is your book, baby.

I enjoyed the character development and was able to relate on many levels.I would definitely recommend this to book.

Can Edmund White do no wrong? This Proustian reverie of his coming to age as a writer and young adult is nothing but spectacular.

This was a most interesting and lovable book to get and delve into. Again, it refers to the Gay lifestyle of a past generation with its ups and downs and dangers too. It's a great read and I recommend it to all others interested in the development of the Gay scene over the years.

Very well written and a good idea of what was happening to gay men in the US in the 1960s

Front cover was detached from the bookAlbeit second hand a bit shoddy