A Room with a View

It took me awhile to get into it.. The first few chapters of English people being provincial in Italy were irritating! I'm glad I stuck with it through to the second section, it got much more interesting once the romantic intrigue got going.

The romance is so thin though! George is far too underwritten a character given how important he turns out to be. We never learn much about him and the only scene of any consequence is the confusing murder in the piazza. The all-important kisses just sort of happen out of the blue with no explication. And Forster gives us very little insight into Lucy's true thoughts, although arguably that's deliberate because she does not know them herself.

I was primed to think this because of the Bad Gays podcast, but... I read this thinness as Forster's own lack of knowledge about romantic relationships. The book was published when he was 29 and a first draft written when he was 23. Meanwhile Forster didn't understand how sex even worked until age 30 and was a virgin until 37. It's remarkable he could write so poignantly about the anguish of love and desire with so little experience himself. But then, maybe that's exactly why he could write this, his own homosexual anguish.

How did anyone understand Forster's writing without knowing he was gay?! I tried asking an AI about that and it said earlier critics focussed on the wit and satire of the novel and the themes of Gothic vs Greek or rationality vs. desire. All very abstract and proper. But to me there certainly seems to be a much queerer reading, about Lucy's confusion being a parallel to a gay man figuring himself out.