3.5
The Beautiful Room Is Empty
ByPublisher Description
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
"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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3.5
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“She sketched me as I wrote. In the warm summer rain we walked through the night. We sat for hours in a booth at the back of a Chinese restaurant. I told her how I was convinced the Buddhists were right, that the self is an illusion, and yet as a writer and even as a person (in that order) I responded to the individuality of everyone I met. How could I reconcile my religious convictions with this artistic response?
“I’ve got it!” she said, silencing me with her raised hand as she pursued a thought. At last she sipped cold tea and said, “But that’s just the way American life is anyway, because we all move around so much and keep losing touch. We have these smoldering encounters in which we tell everything to each other and pledge eternal love, and then a month or a year later we’ve drifted apart, we’re making new pledges and new confessions and—you see? American life is both Buddhist and intensely personal. It’s nothing but these searing, intimate huddles and then great drifting mists of evanescence that drown everything in obscurity. Write about America and you’ll reconcile these opposites.”
I heard the doubt and reproach in the midst of her disquisition and wondered how I could assure her I’d never drift away or stop loving her. I knew we hadn’t yet quite found the form our love would take, doubtlessly because of the conventionality of my social imagination. I didn’t have the insider’s advantage of refashioning public forms to suit my private needs. Yet I did have an ecstatic apprehension of her, of what she meant to me. I’d never let her go.”
About Edmund White
Edmund White was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1940. His fiction includes the autobiographical trilogy A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, and The Farewell Symphony, as well as Caracole, Forgetting Elena, Nocturnes for the King of Naples, and Skinned Alive, a collection of short stories. He is also the author of a highly acclaimed biography of Jean Genet, a short study of Proust, a travel book about gay America—States of Desire—and Our Paris. He is an officer of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and teaches at Princeton University. He lives in New York City.
Other books by Edmund White
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