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Hardcover book. Book in good condition. 228 pages.
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.
Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story was praised as "superior fiction" by the New York Times and as "(perhaps) the best American narrative of male sexual awakening since The Catcher in the Rye" by Chicago Sun-Times. Now Edmund White returns to the spellbinding world of his earlier novel as his young narrator - a sexually obsessed, timidly conventional boy - emerges from the tragi-comedy of his adolescence and make his way, in startling leaps, toward the tentative confidence of early adulthood.
In a narrative that mirrors the insistent rhythm and emotional range of this nameless young man's life, we follow him - from the Midwest to Greenwich Village, from the morally constrained 1950s to the "liberated" 1960s - as he struggles to come to terms with his homosexuality, with his "self and its discontent, isolation, self-hatred, and burning ambition." Scenes of sexual intensity are played off against intellectual debates, family struggles, and passionate if confused explorations of friendship. College and career, literature and art, the oppression of psychoanalysis and the birth of gay liberation-these are some of the themes and conflicts fixed by this relentlessly paced an poetically imagined novel.
