How does Edmund White use imagery in The Beautiful Room Is Empty?

There are several noteworthy points about the book's use of language. Generally rich in imagery and defined by an expansive vocabulary, the narrative is in many ways poetically intense and emotionally evocative, at times almost self-consciously so. There is the occasional sense that while the writing is exceptionally effective at communicating the narrator's experiences, it is somewhat less so at welcoming the reader into those experiences. The point must be made, however, that there is also the strong sense that the author is writing for a particular audience of homosexual men. While the writing of the story, the way in which it's told, may be less than fully effective in connecting with the reader, it's very possible that the events and circumstances of that story can / will awaken echoes of similar experiences in the mind and memory of memories of that particular audience. This sense of an apparent target audience might also explain the graphically intense descriptions associated with the narrator's sexual encounters, writing which comes close to being pornographic, but which is certainly titillating.