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The Beautiful Room is Empty
is a sequel to Edmund White's
A Boy's Own Story
, and takes the anonymous hero of the earlier book from late adolescence, to the further shores of youth, his late twenties. It also takes him from the stern repression of the
mid-West to New York City; from the ‘frumpy cuteness' of Fifties Middle America to the ravishing diversity of the late Sixties; from the solid, merciless, deranged, white middle class to the rootless urban intelligentsia with its mix of race and class and desire.

But, essentially, the narrator's sentimental education concerns neither men nor women but the nature of his own desires. It begins in a painful contradiction: ‘As half-consciously I inched towards my desires for men, I clung to my official goal of stifling these desires.' Driven by a curiosity he believes to be as perverse as its promptings are irresistible, his encounters are bleak with irony, characterised by a deliberate absence of pleasure, as if to enjoy them would make them even more wicked. The narrator's secret life, indeed, most of his sexual life, consists of meeting anonymous flesh in the public toilets he obsessively cruises, the ‘long sentence' served on his knees from which Edmund White extracts an astonished poetry.

In a coffee shop, on a night out with a reckless gaggle of queens – ‘Grab your tiaras, girls' – he notes straight couples stare with open disgust. ‘I was no longer a visitor to the zoo, but one of the animals.' Meanwhile, the narrator's father grudgingly coughs up for the analysis that is supposed to ‘cure' his son. But the ministrations of Dr O'Reilly, speed freak and alcoholic, teetering on the verge of his own breakdown, collapse, only induce more anxiety: ‘If I started from the premise I was sick (and what could be sicker than my compulsive cruising?) then I had to question everything I thought and did. My opinions didn't count, since my judgement was obviously skewed.'

Damaged ghosts, victims of America, drift past. Annie Schroeder, real-life Warhol superstar
avant le jour
, yearns to be a top New York model. A bulimic, she blocks up the drains when she regurgitates the whole ham and entire turkey from which she has made a midnight snack during a Christmas visit home with the narrator; her gesture of disgust and rejection is so comprehensive, if involuntary, that it is a wonder the narrator never thought of bulimia himself.

Into this world of guilt, lust, and occasional fierce excitement erupts Lou, the ‘handsome, ugly man,' scarred, alchoholic, heroin-addicted, irresistible, who loves Ezra Pound, and ‘everything deformed by the will towards beauty', and who loves, too,
the ‘beautiful poetry of gay life'. The narrator clearly hadn't thought of it like that before.

Lou's own huge potential for tragedy has been arrested by his equal potential for the dramatic glamour of the life of homosexual crime celebrated by Burroughs and Genet, the lure of, the necessity for transgression. In the terms of the period, you might say that Lou
enjoys
being a pervert.

It speaks volumes for the narrator's good sense and emotional stability, in spite of all, that he eschews the ‘demon lover' aspect of his new friend and cultivates, instead, a loving friendship. His scandalised mother, for whom the enigmatic Lou is the last straw, suggests an implant of female sex hormones will solve her son's problems: ‘ . . . oestrogens neutralise your sex drive altogether; they neuter you and soon you're free to lead a normal life.'

And yet she loves her son. She truly believes she has his welfare at heart.

Lou suggests the narrator leave Chicago for New York with him, the archetypal journey for the American writer, the mid-West to the Big Apple. Here, normalcy is a more flexible condition; the Sixties are just beginning; the streets are full of what Lou calls ‘Cha-cha queens, hairburners and glandular cases', and the narrator begins, for the first time, to see homosexuality not as deviancy but as a way of being.

And the beautiful stranger arrives at last. The blond Sean. Perhaps love is not so inaccessible, after all. Yet Sean soon cracks up, breaks down, because loving another man is too much evidence that he is homosexual – a recurrent theme of the book, the wish to gratify desire whilst evading stigma, whilst avoiding self-identification whilst evading membership of a stigmatised group. That's putting it in bare, sociological terms. It was a system of repression that killed. Sean goes to live with a cowboy; nobody, he writes, would ever guess this cowboy was gay . . .

The narrator despairs. ‘If as a child I'd known my whole long life was going to be so painful, I'd never have consented to go on leading it.'

But the novel is not over. It is quietly moving towards a remarkable and joyous conclusion that takes place, unfashionably enough, on the barricades, probably the first barricades in the history of street warfare manned by people who saw the funny side of a revolution.

On the day of the death of Judy Garland, the narrator and Lou find themselves in a gay bar, one summer's night; the police raid. There is a riot. The bar was the Stonewall; at this point, the novel enters real history. ‘Lily Law shouldn't have messed with us the night Judy died,' says Lou. Somebody shouts out: ‘Gay is good.' Gay Liberation is about to be born. The Stonewall riot was, the narrator says, ‘The turning point of our lives'. The rioters were not protesting their right to depravity, neuroses, or psychic derangement, but a simple right to be human.

This exemplary novel is written in prose as shining and transparent as glass; it lets you see life through it. It describes how the survivor of a psychological terror campaign retains his humanity.

If I were a teacher, I would recommend this book to every student who asked me why it was necessary to fight the amendment to the Local Government Bill presumably designed to prevent me doing just that. Nobody who has seen the inside of the closet would wish to condemn anyone to return to it.

(1988)

The title of Paul Theroux's new novel recalls that of the Victorian autobiographical masterpiece of erotomania, Walter:
My Secret Life
, with which Theroux's book has something in common. Theroux himself makes a more inscrutable reference to Arthur Waley's
The Secret History of the Mongols
, which Theroux's peripatetic hero, Andre Parent, reads on his way to commit adultery, surely a rather precious choice.

My Secret History
is divided into six sections that take Parent from adolescence in 1956 to middle age in 1984 in a series of self-contained leaps. In the first person, it begins briskly and attractively: ‘I was born in rich America . . .' The voice is fluent, conversational, confiding; the novel would pass the time pleasantly on one of those marathon train rides of which Theroux, in his guise of travel writer, has made such a speciality.

But, under this moderately beguiling surface, there is something stronger and stranger. The real subject of
My Secret History
is libidinal gratification expressed as a basic, irrepressible hunger. At one point, Parent says to an African acquaintance: ‘America's a very hungry country.' Which would be tasteless – Africa is starving to death, after all – were it not a metaphor. Parent's history suggests that to be ‘born poor in rich America' is to be born with a metaphysical lust that nothing, not success, wealth, or the love of women, can satisfy. There is an acknowledged madness in Parent. He wants to fuck the world.

Parent speedily outlines for us the nature of his two lives – one, that ‘of the dreamer, or the sneak', hidden, the other led in public. (Later, he puts it more succinctly: ‘One was sex, the other work.')

And that is enough of that. Theroux does not allow his hero to indulge in introspection, nor to speculate either upon his own motives or those of other characters. As a result, the novel is so free from psychologising that Parent becomes almost a perfect existential hero who does what he does, and, indeed,
who
he does, because he does it.

Part One. Young Parent is the horny sprig of a dour Catholic family in a small New England town. He forms an attachment to a drunken yet charismatic Irish priest not a hair's breadth away from cliché. The priest dies; Andre gets laid. A typical ‘male awakening' scenario, not insensitively done.

Four years pass. Now Andre is at college. He is determined to become a writer, as if writing were a form of phallic mastery. He is still horny as hell; happily, he is maturing into one of those young men, familiar in fiction, whose very presence impels women to remove their clothing but when a girlfriend suffers a vile abortion he is briefly filled with guilt and determines to leave the US.

Another four years pass. Andre is now in Black Africa, teaching school, and screwing local bar girls omnivariously, taking crabs and VD in his stride, kicking the girls out in the morning before they bore him with their chatter. Four years later, he's a dead mark for the first girl he meets who screws
and
talks about T. S. Eliot. Jenny. ‘It was wonderful to be with this woman. We talked about books we liked. We took turns quoting poetry we had memorised.' Wow. It must be Love. Jenny is not Black African but blonde English; Parent proves conventional enough in his marriage choice.

Again, a lapse of four years. The couple have settled in London where Andre, returning from amassing material for a travel book, discovers Jenny has been unfaithful in his absence. His bizarre revenge is to discharge at her lover a water-pistol filled with urine. Jenny is angry but soon begs forgiveness, an episode which needs more finesse than Theroux gives it to make plausible. This section ends with a touch of pure Hollywood, a phone call from an agent to say the travel book is about to do extremely well.

Skip a decade. Andre is rich and famous, with not only a lavish house, Jenny and their child in London but also a lavish house and mistress on Cape Cod to mark his triumphant return to Massachusetts. The mistress, Eden, with her dyed black hair,
gourmet cooking, and girlish lisp when randy (‘If I'm bad you'll have to put me to bed') is clearly a refugee from an early Feiffer cartoon but Parent likes her style and takes her on a trip to India.

A few weeks later, neurotically anxious to duplicate his life in every way, he takes Jenny on the same trip in what, to the reader, looks a transparent bid to be found out. He is found out; Jenny says Parent must choose and the novel ends as Parent announces he knows ‘exactly what to do' but teasingly fails to tell us.

I'd suggest a vasectomy. As it stands, Parent's career usefully demonstrates the interconnectedness of sexism and racism; I hope this was Theroux's point.

(1989)

Gilbert Hernandez' comic strips in the series,
Heartbreak Soup
, of which this collection,
Duck Feet
, is the second portion available in Britain, are about gossip. Especially, about yesterday's gossip, about the memories our parents share with us so we almost come to think that they are our memories too. The intimate folklore of family. Gilbert Hernandez' family, of course, is not my family, or your family, but this kind of folklore has a cross-cultural similarity, most of all in cultures where people often find themselves short of a bob.

Families, particularly extended families – and the families in
Heartbreak Soup
are often stretched to the limit – flourish best in small towns. This involves Gilbert Hernandez in a celebration of small-town life. In the very small town of Palomar (population 356), the narratives of its inhabitants' lives weave in and out of each other with the same claustrophobic compulsiveness of the lives in the marvellous novels of Louise Erdrich
(Love Medicine, The Beet Queen)
, set in remote townships in the American mid-West.

The novel composed of interwoven small-town lives has a long tradition in the United States. Sherwood Anderson's
Winesburg, Ohio
(1919) is a classic. But Palomar is not in the United States; it is somewhere south of the border. And although the strip sometimes goes out of its way to pay homage to a painter, the Mexican artist, Frida Kahlo, there is nothing in the least ‘literary' about
Heartbreak Soup
. Nevertheless, Hernandez shares the same project as Erdrich and Anderson: the recreation of a place and time that explains why and what we are, here and now.

Erdrich and Anderson were raised in communities much like the ones they write about. Gilbert Hernandez does not even speak the Spanish which is the mother tongue of his characters. That gives his project an even greater urgency.

He says that the stories came, mostly, from his mother, told with her apron on while she was making the dinner or ironing. Stories about Mexico, when she was a girl, and her first years in the States. Gilbert and his brother, Jaime, creator of the comic strip,
Love and Rockets
, live in Oxnard, sixty miles outside Hollywood. In California, the signs in bus stations are in both English and Spanish: bilingual education is a burning public topic: the state is re-Hispanicising itself while you watch and yet its image and aspirations remain securely Anglo.

But the Spanish arrived in California first. Hence the place names: San Diego, La Jolla, Sacramento, and so on. Indeed, they got to the entire bottom bit of the USA first: Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Florida. After a century or so in the back seat, the Spanish are staging a come-back, recolonising the lost territory of the Mexican Empire to such effect that there are towns like Palomar deep in the heart of Texas – towns just as fly-blown and dirt-poor, teeming with barefoot kids, in which English, if spoken at all, is a reluctantly acquired second language. This invasion has been caused by economic desperation, not a desire for cultural expansion; what will happen when the barefoot kids, children of recent immigrants, grow up and demand a share of the All-American apple pie is anybody's guess.