Another Country in Queereaders

Mar 23, 2017 Chris rated it it was amazing

Shelves: american

This was astonishingly good, I thought. I was not bowled over by Giovanni's Room (apologies to the gay gods), and so I had considered that perhaps Baldwin was like others who straddle the fiction/essay line and much stronger in the latter, joining the camp of folks like Didion, Sontag, and perhaps you could argue David Foster Wallace. There would be nothing wrong with that! I saw I Am Not Your Negro, the documentary that used Baldwin's non-fiction as the basis for its screenplay, and was, as exp This was astonishingly good, I thought. I was not bowled over by Giovanni's Room (apologies to the gay gods), and so I had considered that perhaps Baldwin was like others who straddle the fiction/essay line and much stronger in the latter, joining the camp of folks like Didion, Sontag, and perhaps you could argue David Foster Wallace. There would be nothing wrong with that! I saw I Am Not Your Negro, the documentary that used Baldwin's non-fiction as the basis for its screenplay, and was, as expected, deeply moved, shook, provoked, and fed by his words. His power to target and describe sweeping social problems with a dexterous subtlety that reveals the complicated psychological forces at the core of them is unparalleled.

We had a copy of this on the shelf in my apartment, so when I came home from the documentary I picked it up (being bored and unimpressed by another book I was in the middle of that I won't mention here). It starts in passion and doesn't really let up from there. I was gripped. The book follows a group of what I guess would be called hipsters in the '60s, and is centered in Greenwich Village though there are brief detours to other parts of the world. The novel starts with a focus on Rufus, a black jazz player who moves among white and black worlds, with a white best friend, Vivaldo, who becomes another main character in the novel. Rufus falls in love with a white Southern girl, and that relationship is paralleled to Vivaldo's encounters and relationships with black women. There are other friends who enter the picture--a queer actor, Eric, who is their friend, a writer who was Vivaldo's teacher, and his wife, both of whom are now their friends. These characters move in circles with each other, and the novel moves about in following them.

There is a lot of violence throughout--sexual violence, emotional violence, physical violence, all kinds. Lots of trigger warnings should be given before reading to anyone especially sensitive to these kind of depictions, as Baldwin describes the violence unflinchingly, almost too much so. There is, of course, a point to doing that. These huge massive problems--racism especially, but also gender and sexuality issues--swirl above in structural ways, but also enter deeply in the psyches of people, as they do here, and emerge in passions that spill over the control and good intentions of even well-meaning people trying to reckon with them. All of the characters here are well-meaning, hip, cosmopolitan liberals who nonetheless are deeply plagued by coming to terms with their own positions in society. No one is perfect because no is allowed to be perfect, like in life. The characters are attracted to each other at the same time as they're deeply unequipped to handle and respond to the full difference that the others represent.

The book has the feeling of a Cassavettes film--it seems especially linked to Shadows, which was released only three years before this was published. The emotions are raw and unrelenting. The characters are never neatly tied together or fully explained. Everything set into motion reaches a blazing speed. The driving force of these passions made it, for me, an incredibly compelling read. The language follows them in their breathlessness but never sinks beneath their beauty. There are many passages of long, pounding sentences that took me to the core of the characters' experiences. It is a beautiful book in the way that watching an actor go to the extremes of a desperate, driven, imperfect character is beautiful.

I can't describe too much more because there are spoilers. The book takes big themes and locates them deeply in the volatile matter of personal relationships, where they begin and return for each of us as well. ...more

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