White, Edmund. The Beautiful Room is Empty (1988). New York: Vintage, 1994.

Avid readers will recall the first book of this autobiographical novel trilogy, A Boy’s Own Story, and how much I disliked it, mostly for its awful prose. In this book, the writing’s better on a stylistic level—White having learned a bit more about what readers of any sexuality can stomach—but the book still falls flat.

It’s a shame that White is our Updike, which is to say that he’s our learned and well read and omnipresent white-male writer born decades ago whom we are meant to revere solely because of his status and age and productivity. It means that I have to read the final book of the trilogy, The Farewell Symphony, which I’m hoping to god is a lot more palatable.

The problem with these novels is that they aren’t novels. They’re memoirs labeled as novels at a time, I imagine, when the memoir wasn’t as marketable a genre. And so they’re all coming-of-age stories through various ages, this one being the narrator’s college life and post-college life in New York; it ends at the Stonewall riots, which would be interesting if White wasn’t so committed to his own narrow perspective in retelling the events.

But the narrator (which is White’s self) is often so callous and repellent, and the novels never seem to place their narrator in a position of critique. We’re meant to sympathize with whatever his plight is (the lonely sadness of cruising men’s rooms for sex up to three times a day), but it’s hard to when sex in these novels is treated as a kind of sporty inevitability. Unfulfilling emotionally, sure, but that doesn’t mean the narrator should try to really feel for anyone.

I mean:

I met a pretty Korean [. . .] who lived next door. Whenever the mechanical world frustrated him—if his bike jammed or the laundry machine swallowed his coins, or his key snapped off in a lock—he’d ring my bell, trudge in, take off his clothes, fold them neatly on my white wood chair, and lie face down on my white bed. He’d take it like a man, bite the pillow if I hurt him, and nothing had ever felt quite so good as those small taut muscles under that chamois-soft skin, the color of cinnamon when it’s sprinkled on cappuccino. That’s my way of saying that a low fire, a pilot light, burned under that glove-smooth skin, and that he smelled excitingly of that foul fermented cabbage the Koreans like to snack on. The minute it was over he’d dress and leave, his eyebrows raised in painful doubt as though he didn’t quite understand what had just happened. He had the whitest teeth. (107).

Paging Edward Said.... And this is 1988!