Edmund White, who died in 2025 at 85, leaves behind one of the broadest, most transgressive, and most distinctive bodies of fiction in postwar American literature. His oeuvre moves restlessly between intensely confessional memoir, literary biography, and autofictional novels without ever quite settling on any of them.
His reputation still rests largely on A Boy’s Own Story (1982), long treated as a landmark of gay writing, but, to my mind, the finest book of the trilogy is the second volume, The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988). It is a quieter, stranger, and more intellectually unsettling novel, whose design only becomes fully visible on rereading. What first appears to be a loose autobiographical narrative gradually reveals itself as remarkably orchestrated: a story obsessed with the tension between bodily experience and the fantasy of self-erasure, between the stubborn fact of being and the equally persistent desire for nothingness.
A Boy’s Own Story is the story of a child, and its prose is therefore deliberately elementary and declarative. The Beautiful Room Is Empty, by contrast, follows the narrator from boarding school to the University of Michigan and then to New York, and its prose reflects an intellectual consciousness that moves deftly between Cicero, Kierkegaard, Buddhist ideas such as anatta (the non-soul), and the music of Sibelius and Haydn. While a novel of ideas, it is also brilliantly textured: no novel I have read pays so much attention to smell, touch, and taste. I feel about The Beautiful Room Is Empty much as Lionel Trilling said of E.M. Forster:
We read him once and think we have taken his measure; we read him again and find that he has more to say to us than we had supposed; and each time we return to him we discover some new delicacy of perception, some further wisdom of the heart. The irony being that White did not particularly like Forster, preferring writers such as Vladimir Nabokov, Christopher Isherwood, and Elizabeth Bowen.
Much has been made of Edmund White’s sexual frankness, and White discusses the pros and cons of having been thought of as a specifically gay writer rather than a universal one in his memoirs. Susan Sontag, for example, advised him not to come out, about which he later wrote in his memoir City Boy (2009):
“I thought a bit resentfully that all these ‘blue-chip’ artists—Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, Susan Sontag, Robert Wilson—never came out. We openly gay artists had to deal with the dismissive or condescending judgments all around us—’Of course since I’m not gay myself your work seems so exotic to me’—while the Blue Chips sailed serenely on, universal and eternal.”
I can see both sides of the argument. I find White’s sexual candour illuminating. It is genuinely enlightening to learn how men see other men as sexual beings, as objects rather than subjects. On the other hand, sometimes the very camp dialogue in his memoirs can be grating. I could happily live without all the “my dears”. No doubt others might prefer it the other way round. That’s the risk you take with candour.
The Artfulness in The Beautiful Room Is Empty
The artistry of The Beautiful Room lies in two main aspects: the sensual detail and the underlying metaphor. The detail throughout is wonderfully sensuous. On almost every page, even within the most intellectual discussion, Edmund White will land a precise sensory image that lights up the paragraph and draws the reader into the immediacy of the moment.
For example, he describes the scents of the student toilet with a musical euphony and precise sensory detail: “the scratch of a match in a stall and soon the rich scent of burning tobacco creeping out over the ammonia smell of disinfectant.” Or how a man has “furry legs, as though he were still wearing hip-length black stockings but had peeled off the matching tops”. Or this remarkable character description that goes beyond physicality into ethnography:
“His jawbone and nose looked out of joint, as if they’d been broken by the same event that had smashed his teeth and inscribed the scar. Even the index finger of his right hand didn’t quite lie down smoothly. It looked as if it had been snapped, rotated slightly, then rewired.
Yet nothing gruesome or shocking was suggested by these alterations. Rather, they counted as painful but elegant tribal decorations cicatrized into the flesh, a sort of allover circumcision. This tribal idea was emphasized by his hairless torso, his long, smooth, slightly bowed legs, and his small-pored, high-cheekboned face, which fit as tightly to his skull as a swimming cap. He was half American Indian, the countertenor told me later that night.”
Even the simplest pleasures have a wonderful sensuality but also a cultural philosophy: “[W]e aesthetes of course lived for high art, but (come on, admit it) we also loved wild rides in jalopies, heavy petting, window shopping, followed by a really greasy burger, cherry Coke, and chocolate cream pie.” Not Coke but Cherry Coke – exactly. And heavy petting is unmistakably 1950s.
The combination of high literary culture and tactile imagery are seen in individual sentences, too, as with: “Although I was an atheist, I was a mild sort of unbeliever, looking back with reluctance at those brocaded chasubles and smoky censers, but Maria despised all churches with the wrath of a Savonarola.” (Girolamo Savonarola was a 15th Century Dominican friar who advocated the destruction of secular art and culture).
Edmund White describes the sexual world of his narrator with equal vividness. An underground toilet becomes a scene for an orgy: “In a second, this raw country boy at the urinal with the rosy forearms and red knuckles, the sickle of a vein superimposed on the hammer of his hand, has turned toward the room, brandishing a big red penis. An instant later everyone has converged on him, the men in the stalls emerge, one is kissing him, the second licking his testicles, a third man the penis, and another is standing beside him, arm around his waist, as though to lend him courage and companionship.”
The hammer and sickle image perhaps seems slightly absurd, but White repeatedly insists on the comradeship of anonymous sex. Elsewhere, there’s a remarkable sensuality to his evocation of an anonymous student:
“And without further prelude, he sank to his knees shoving his brown thighs and white groin under the partition, and I also knelt to feast on his erection, inhaling the clean smell of soap, my hands exploring the lichee-size testicles, then traveling up smooth skin.”
In one sentence we get smell (“the clean smell of soap”), texture (the “smooth skin”), visual contrast (“brown thighs and white groin”), simile (“lichee-size testicles”), physical motion (the student “sank to his knees” and was “shoving his groin” under the partition) and perhaps even taste (“feasting” again being le mot juste).
These passages, though transgressive — or at least unusually explicit in their treatment of male bodies — never seem gratuitous. White is too subtle a novelist to write for sensation alone. What he is exploring is sexual obsession, not as frustration but as excess.
Heterosexual fiction has often portrayed desire as thwarted; Edmund White dramatises the opposite condition, in which physical intimacy is easily obtained but fails to produce any lasting relation. The result is not fulfillment but a strange weightlessness, a life of encounters without attachment. In this sense, the novel’s sexual world becomes another expression of its central tension between being and nothingness: the body insists on presence, yet the self remains elusive.
Alongside sexual compulsion goes despair. White does not idolise his narrator, as do so many autofiction writers. He is quite prepared to make him sound foolish, as when he asks about Lou’s past: “‘I’d become addicted to heroin and my parents put me in an expensive psychiatric hospital, the one where the movie stars go. My brother was already there.’
‘What a wild family!’ I exclaimed, although my burst of enthusiasm made the whole room dip nauseatingly […]
‘Yes,’ Lou said witheringly, ‘quite wild. My brother committed suicide soon after my arrival. He was living in a halfway house after five years of expert professional treatment.’ A small black toad of a laugh hopped through his lips.
‘Oh, Lou,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry,’ and I wanted to touch him, but I was afraid his body would be cold.
‘But the wildness of my tale is just starting,’ Lou insisted.”
The phrase “A small black toad of a laugh” is sublime. More importantly, he writes about the crushing desperation of resenting his sexuality. Utterly alienated, he seeks not so much transformation as to deny his contingency:
“Perhaps because I hated my sexuality and believed it could be redirected, I’d come to see every aspect of my being as vague and shifting, and in that very cloudiness had lain my definition: I was the boy who hadn’t started living yet. But now I felt stigmatized by my actuality, by the mole between my shoulder blades, by the botched job of my circumcision, so that a dewlap hung down on one side but not the other […] for my pride, yes, my pride insisted I could be whatever I chose. Every morning the tabula was rasa. Maybe that was why the Buddhist doctrine of the non-soul, the anattā, attracted me so much, because it suggested I was potentially everything and actually nothing. I could wake up one morning gay or straight—or as nothing, since Buddhism seemed to annihilate such essences.”
Being and Nothingness
Hence, his cruising is also a dramatisation of the question of being and nothingness that underlies the entire novel. The early chapters are filled with absence, winter, empty rooms, and the life of the mind – philosophy, the abstractness of classical music, the attempt to understand oneself from a distance.
As the story progresses, the temperature rises. The settings become more crowded, the air thicker, the encounters more physical, the seasons modulate from Midwest winters to New York summers, with soul food and soul music. The narrator is drawn from the cold of nothingness into the heat of being.
These motifs recur throughout. He presents his father’s idea of socialising as filling empty guest rooms:
“If he had to entertain equals, his idea of a party was a once-every-two-years blow-out for which the house would be repainted, bricks pointed, gutters cleaned, lawn rolled. Every room on every floor would be thrown open for white-glove inspection. Not a speck of dust lurked behind a single figurine, not a vase went without a bouquet, not a single blown-glass, kidney-shaped ashtray that wasn’t spotless beside its gaping “silent butler,” not a single lamp unlit, not a bathroom rack without its full rigging of guest towels.”
The lives of the isolated Midwest art school students are similarly cold and lonely:
“They seemed to have bought the right to eccentricity by working very hard. That was the American part. They’d wear layers and layers of sweaters, fleece-lined boots, hats and babushkas, mittens with the fingers missing, and they’d stamp their feet against the cold as they labored late into the night. The wind slipped in through rattling skylights and cold seeped up off stone floors; even at noon the sky never rivaled in brightness the humming neon tubes above them, while their vats of clay grew crystals and the nails they drove into boards seared cold into their naked fingers […]”
Yet things gradually warm up. The later chapters move to a very different atmosphere, the crowded heat of 1960s New York:
“On this hot July night the streets were thronged with people […] Cars on MacDougal slowly waded through people like buffalo through flooded paddies. The sound of voices, of street musicians, rang off the brick walls of tenements. Above the streetlights shadowy families sat on metal fire escapes. Now we passed an ornate Italian coffee shop, flyblown mirrors hung in gilt frames dimmer than a helmet in a Rembrandt. The eagle atop the espresso machine flew imperiously through a cloud of steam.”
This modulation gives physical form to the relation between being and nothingness. Edmund White’s narrator yearns to dissolve his selfhood, yet he experiences life through the stubborn immediacy of sensation, which he conveys with exquisite accuracy. Smell, touch, hunger, embarrassment, sexual desire: these insist on the reality of the body even when the mind longs to escape into theory. In the middle of The Beautiful Room Is Empty, he makes the conflict explicit in conversation with his friend Maria:
“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.”
The phrase “these searing, intimate huddles and then great drifting mists of evanescence” is a wonderful antithesis.
Another way Edmund White allegorizes the narrator’s quest for non-being is by deliberately reducing his agency. His friends have all the viciously funny lines, e.g., “Forget Koreans,” William hissed angrily, “it’s clit size”, while Lou despairs of gay life: “I should be founding my own sweet little family, but I’m still bouncing around the bars, being probed by fingers, mauled, stuffed with cock, and I wake up every morning hung over, hemorrhoids aflame, crotch hairs plastered down with someone else’s come.” The narrator, however, perceives far more than he participates. He goes out with a group of gay men who act extremely campily, but he still wants to portray himself as the outsider:
“The girls had stopped chewing their gum and were noisily sucking the ice melt in their Coke glasses. I smiled conspiratorially at them, as if to say, Aren’t these guys weird, but I noticed that they were looking back at me with open disgust. One of their dates said, ‘Some people are sick, real sick,’ which touched off a volley of birdcalls at our table (‘Are you sick? Who’s sick? You don’t look sick’) and a whole dumbshow of fever tests (palm on forehead) and tongue checks (‘Say ah’). For the first time I’d crossed the line. I was no longer a visitor to the zoo, but one of the animals.”
Edmund White’s Deeply Humanist Achievement
This is all part of the novel’s attempt to reduce the narrator’s presence — a remarkable strategy in a work so close to autobiography. The title The Beautiful Room Is Empty is thus ironic: empty rooms might be perfect and beautiful while bodies and relationships might be messy and contingent, but it is only by accepting their disorder that we become fully integrated and human, if never fully at peace.
However, the title is not merely paradoxical. The empty room is not only a loss but a temptation. Repeatedly, the narrator longs for the stillness of a self without history, without desire, without contingency, even as the novel itself insists on the irreducible presence of the body.
This is the final irony. The Beautiful Room Is Empty often feels deeply humanist in tone. Its sympathy for individuals, its attention to personal relations, its delight in the particularities of bodies and voices, all seem to place it in the tradition of E.M. Forster or even of 19th-century realism. The novel is a bildungsroman in charting the narrator’s growth towards maturity and a Künstlerroman in mapping his intellectual development. Yet the ideas that run through it point in the opposite direction.
It therefore celebrates individuality while continually questioning whether individuality exists at all. What gives this story its peculiar power is that White never resolves this contradiction. The warmth of granular experience coexists with the coldness of amorphous identity, and the reader feels both at once.
In tackling these “opposites”, Edmund White belongs to a wider postwar tradition in which the novel becomes a testing ground for the reality of the self. If prewar writers from James Joyce to Virginia Woolf were preoccupied with the difference between art and reality, writers as different as Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and Vladimir Nabokov repeatedly address the mind longing for freedom and abstraction when life is lived through the stubborn facts of the body.
By the end of the century, this tension often takes a more extreme form, as in the unstable narrators of late American fiction, from Don DeLillo to Bret Easton Ellis, where identity itself seems like a performance without substance, to the point where Patrick Bateman can announce, “I simply am not there”. What gives The Beautiful Room Is Empty its peculiar force is that Edmund White stages this conflict without abandoning the density of lived experience: the narrator may doubt the existence of the self, but the world of the novel never lets him forget the reality of the body.
It is this underlying convergence – the way sensual detail and symbolic imagery all express the same conflict between being and nothingness – that makes Edmund White, at his best, a novelist of the highest order. Like Forster, he is concerned with the moral reality of personal relations; like Joyce, with the life of consciousness itself; like Nabokov, with the sensuous reality of the moment, and its moral implications.
Few postwar writers have attained such subtlety, let alone united thought and sensation with such assurance. The Beautiful Room Is Empty is far from being merely a landmark of gay writing: it is one of the peaks of postwar American literature. One reads it again and again, and each time the story seems to have grown larger, deeper, and more rewarding.