White, Edmund. The Beautiful Room is Empty. Alfred A. Knopf, 1988.
Reason read: to continue the series started in June in honor of Pride Month.
When we rejoin our nameless narrator he is now seventeen years old and exploring deeper relationships, sexual and platonic. He has moved from the Midwest to the culturally explosive Greenwich Village of New York to pursue college and a career. There he keeps his relationships in different compartments. The fraternity brothers do not mingle with the bohemians and the bohemians do not know the Chinese. And no one knows of the anonymous hairy legs and hard penises of grimy bathrooms. There is a lot more descriptive sex in The Beautiful Room is Empty. Our narrator is less concerned with “going straight” then he is finding a handsome man with whom to link arms and entwine legs. The shame of homosexuality burns with a smaller flame but is always there.
Favorite lines, “A small black toad of a laugh hopped through his lips” (p 137)
Author fact: Edmund’s middle name is Valentine.
Book trivia: The Beautiful Room is Empty is the second book in the trilogy.
Playlist: Bach, Barbra Streisand’s “Happy Days are Here Again”, Bartok, Baroque Revival, Beethoven, Brahms, Brenda Lee’s “Break It to Me Gently”, Caruso’s “Oh Ginnie Whiskey”, Charles Mingus, Charlie Parker, Des Grieux aria, Dionne Warwick, Everly Brothers, “God bless the Chile That’s Got His Own”, “Good Morning Heartache”, Hammerklavier Sonata, Handel, Haydn, “I’ll Be Seeing You in Apple Blossom Time”, “I’m Travelin’ Light”, “Kitten on the Keys”, “Mister”, Pucci’s “Marion Lescaut”, “My Guy”, Rosemary Clooney’s “If I Had Known You Was A-Comin’ I’d’ve Baked a Cake”, Stravinsky’s “the Firebird”, Tchaikovsky, “This is Love”, Timi Yuro’s “Make the World Go Away”,
Nancy said: Pearl did not say anything specific about The Beautiful Room is Empty.
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the outdated chapter called “Gay and Lesbian Fiction: Out of the Closet” (p 93). These days we would say LGBTQ Fiction: Loud and Proud!
~*LunaSea*~ 