Unable to finish reading this - Mary

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. ( )

One of those 1001 Books you must read before you die that I could have done without. This is gay lit and therefore there is not much I find worth reading. I do not care to read about gay sex, gay toilet behavior and therefore I don't think that qualifies as literature I must read. What is good about the book is that it is a coming of age story and a coming out story. I guess this is the second book of a trilogy that is almost semi autobiographical. It tells the story of gays in the 1960s up to the 70s. I really did not see much that qualifies as literature. ( )

Sometimes it seems nothing changes and at other times everything does. In this novel we are confronted with these two realities: the comforting illusion of the States in the 50s and the gross and terrible ways homosexuality was treated. Through the lens of Bunny we see the tension growing up as a gay boy in a heteronormative society where all his impulses will be denatured and criminalised. The gentle slope that we see him climb is a testimony to how far gay rights have come. A shining, raw light onto an epoch. ( )

With the same level that I loved "A Boy's Own Story," I disliked "The Beautiful Room is Empty."
There felt, for me, a huge disconnect from the first novel to this second. It did not feel as if the protagonist were the same person at all, and I think that hurt the novel. I liked the protagonist in "Story," and felt a strong distaste for the protagonist in "Room."
I think for me there were a lot of things that just went wrong. Mostly, I don't think a clear picture of who the protagonist is, was ever really established. White spends so much time describing and analyzing the other people in the protagonist's life, that I felt the novel seemed more about them than him. I couldn't really tell you much about him, whereas, we were given so much information about all the side characters. It felt less a story about the protagonist and more a story about the people in his life. For me, this just made the protagonist less interesting, and underdeveloped, allowing very little room for me to care much about him.
I also found the end horrible. It ended on such a random note, that felt completely abstract to the rest of the novel. I understand their is a third book to the series, but generally it would have been nice to have some sort of segway, or ending that fit with the narrative.
I wanted to love this novel, but just couldn't. Compared to his first, it fell extremely short for me. ( )