The Beautiful Room Is Empty by Edmund White
Published 1988 · 53,900 words · about 4 hours at an average pace
How hard is The Beautiful Room Is Empty to read?
The Beautiful Room Is Empty scores 57 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 62 out of 100
- Rich, precise, deliberately literary.
- Sentence structure: 68 out of 100
- Long, elegant sentences.
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- Concrete young adulthood held at a reflective distance.
- Information density: 52 out of 100
- Light on event.
- Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
- An older narrator reshaping his younger self.
- Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
- The bar and the analyst's office carry weight.
- Ironic distance: 62 out of 100
- Steady distance between the narrator's wishes and his judgement.
- Resolution withholding: 58 out of 100
- Stonewall arrives without resolving anything personal.
- Structural complexity: 52 out of 100
- Non-chronological within a broad forward movement.
How The Beautiful Room Is Empty is regarded
The Beautiful Room Is Empty holds a literary regard score of 61 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.