Review by Booklist Review
The conclusion to White's autobiographical trilogy, begun by A Boy's Own Story (1982) and continued in The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988), spans from the pre-Stonewall 1960s to the near present. Whether recalling tricks from the days when no gay man seriously considered the use of condoms or grieving the most recent in a heartbreaking number of losses to AIDS, White writes sparely and evocatively of time and place and, above all, elegantly. Some have found his work emotionally cold or discomfiting because of his unapologetic snobbery and preoccupation with physical beauty. But others gladly steep themselves in the bittersweet pool of emotion beneath the polished surface of his prose. In this book, readers will find an older, maturer talent reflecting on the sweeping power of friendship, caring, and love in all its aspects as the author-protagonist faces the remainder of his life (White, HIV-positive for a decade, has yet to develop AIDS) without most of his friends and acquaintances. --Whitney Scott
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Marked equally by erotic fervor and lyrical intensity, the final installment in White's autobiographical trilogy (following A Boy's Own Story and The Beautiful Room Is Empty) is also the longest, the most baroque and the most elegiac. It carries us from the heady days of the Stonewall Riots through the ravages of AIDS. As usual, White subordinates his interest in the larger matters of recent gay history to the task of vividly evoking the men in the narrator's life through whom those events are understoodusually in a sympathetic, Proustian effort at social taxonomy. The giggling, snobbish, closeted "White Russians" slumming at the Stonewall typify one kind of gay man, just as Brandya sequined and exquisitely theatrical drag queenrepresents another. The narrator literally embraces many of themhe seems perpetually as surprised by his catholic tastes in men as he is by the fetishes of others. The novel is invigoratingly, rigorously artificial, flirting with mannerism even as it celebrates ésprit and erudition in others (one James Merrill-esque poet dismisses some Japanese scrolls as "the usual swirls before pine"). Expatriate life, first in Rome and then (for a more extensive period) in an initially inhospitable Paris sharpens the narrator's sense of isolation; a rejection slip for his novel sends him into suicidal despairfrom which salvation lies (typically) in a liaison with a Danish tourist. As the narrator's writing career flourishes, he finds himself in the rarefied company of powerful, learned editors, poets and novelistscompany that intersects rather than stands distinct from the priapic habitués of Greenwich Village. Extended episodes involving his mother's decline into illness and dementia, his father's death and his sister's coming to terms with her lesbianism highlight the insularity of the narrator's world. The book is best enjoyed not for a strong storyindeed, the Brice for whom the narrator mourns at the beginning and close is rather peripheralbut for its luminous snapshots of New York, Paris and Rome and of the vital parade of mendowdy, forbiddingly gorgeous, sylph-like, ephebic, closeted, defiantly and militantly outthat crowd its pages. BOMC selection; first serial to the New Yorker. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
White rounds out the trilogy on gay life begun with A Boy's Own Story and The Beautiful Room Is Empty. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
This long, rich fiction, set mostly in Manhattan and Paris, concludes White's autobiographical trilogy--and falls somewhere in quality between the pellucid excellence of A Boy's Own Story (1983) and the mannered redundancy of its sequel, The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988). Here, the story of a generation--the one that originated the gay liberation movement in the late 1960s, then began dying out a few years later with the AIDS pandemic--is compressed into the remembered experiences of its narrator, a bereaved lover mourning the deaths and looking backward over 30 years' worth of sexual adventuring and slow progress toward maturity and success as a writer. White gives a good graphic picture of bohemian Paris in 1968, and elsewhere offers unusual perspectives on familiar locales (cruising at the Colosseum in Rome, observing ``Fire Island as an exact analogue of medieval Japan''). The novel's signal weakness is the sameness of the many, many men who wander in and out of the narrator's life (his recently deceased lover Brice is scarcely a character at all; on the other hand, Jamie, a sybaritic NYC ``blueblood,'' exhibits a cockeyed charisma that fully justifies the narrator's exasperated fascination with him). White writes plaintively about the disappointments of aging and losing one's sexual allure, and convincingly connects the decline of phallic power with the fear of literary senescence. If he's a bit smug about the mores and pleasures of being a gym rat, he writes vividly, and always amusingly, about the mechanics and etiquette of ``tricking.'' White's unmatched ability to communicate the tension between asserting one's right to be ``different'' and yearning to be accepted as ``normal'' is brilliantly displayed again. Nothing human is alien to him, and none of his alienated souls is anything less than achingly human. (First serial to the New Yorker; Book-of- the-Month selection)
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
