SOURCE: "From celebration to elegy," in Times Literary Supplement, July 1, 1994, p. 13.

In the following review, Powell complains that, "As so often in the book, [The Burning Library White's admirable capacity for sympathetic understanding not only inhibits his critical judgment but actually weakens the case being argued."]

"Like any agile debater," confesses the student narrator of Edmund White's second autobiographical novel, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, "I could defend either side of the question, but I was too immoral to wonder which side was right." Within limits it's an entertaining and an engaging quality which for White becomes the literary dandy's irrepressible urge to try on new clothes, but it makes for some maddening contradictions and for the odd queasy moment when, beneath the loudest suit, there seems to be nothing but a tailor's dummy. In fact, this new collection of his essays spanning twenty-five years would have been...