Alfred A. Knopf. The Beautiful Room Is Empty By Edmund White 228 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. The Beautiful Room Is Empty,'' whose title comes from a letter by Franz Kafka about the inability of two like-minded people to make contact. There are in the book explicit scenes of lovemaking.
Several considerations make the book universal.
It is a sequel to the author's earlier novel of development, the ironically titled ''A Boy's Own Story,'' which recounted the nameless narrator's life from childhood through adolescence and succeeded with great skill in rendering his awakening sexual tastes in terms that any open-minded reader could identify with. So anyone who admired the earlier novel will be predisposed toward the second story of this Bildungsroman, which takes the nameless protagonist through the rest of his prep school experience, then on to four years at the University of Michigan, and then to Greenwich Village when it was edging into the social turmoil of the 1960's. But even without the help of the earlier book, ''The Beautiful Room'' has its wider frames of reference. As he grows to recognize and act on his sexual impulses, we are led through a gallery of colorful characters, general enough to be recognizable as types, specific enough to be themselves, one or two of them touchingly funny. If I act like a perfect lady nothing truly untoward will happen to me.