Another Country in Queereaders

Oct 27, 2009 Jesse rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: authors-of-color, american-lit, queer-lit, 1960-s, formative, book-club, read-in-2009, in-the-village

Wow. Just... wow. Kind of weird—my reaction is not declare Another Country a new favorite, I just didn't love it in that way. And yet, and yet, it penetrated deeply, perhaps more deeply than some books I do consider my favorite...

Perhaps this has to do with how perplexing Baldwin is as an author—it takes a while, almost too much effort to get into the story, and then suddenly, unexpectedly you're in an ever-tightening vice, not sure how the hell Baldwin got you there before you even managed to n Wow. Just... wow. Kind of weird—my reaction is not declare Another Country a new favorite, I just didn't love it in that way. And yet, and yet, it penetrated deeply, perhaps more deeply than some books I do consider my favorite...

Perhaps this has to do with how perplexing Baldwin is as an author—it takes a while, almost too much effort to get into the story, and then suddenly, unexpectedly you're in an ever-tightening vice, not sure how the hell Baldwin got you there before you even managed to notice. He certainly has a way with words, beautiful, almost aggressively lyrical without ever being showy; but what his words do have is weight, an almost unbearable density that in some passages seem to weigh so heavily upon the skin, as if their sole purpose is to rip to shreds any layers of resistance, pick apart any and every last defense...

Really, I suppose that's as good a description as any of what Baldwin does to his characters; he flays them alive so their intangible insides—their hopes, fears, secrets, contradictions, prejudices, dreams—are splayed unceremoniously upon dirty Greenwich Village sidewalks and greasy tables in the smoky corners of dive bars for each other to see, to gawk at, to pick ruthlessly at, to take up and wield like weapons to destroy each other, to bind each other closer than ever before...

And to take it one step further—the title kind of demands as much—the same could be said about Baldwin's general examination of America: mercilessly yet lovingly (the oh-so-thin line separating love from hate is a reoccurring preoccupation throughout the book) ripping the American psyche apart. Granted, his focus on a very particular group, mid-to-late 50's Greenwich Village, certainly one of the most socially progressive enclaves in society at that time. But that's almost what makes Baldwin's exposé so very painful—he's unearthing and then brutally exposing the most hidden prejudices of the particular kind (regarding race, gender, class, sexuality) that liberals and artistic types like to think they've managed to exorcise and escape from. Baldwin's indictment of white liberal guilt can be particularly agonizing...

Kind of hopeless (the constant refrain at our first bookclub discussion: "it's amazing how so little has changed..."), but oh, so very necessary. Anybody who claims we live in a post-racial, post-anything era here in America needs to be promptly slapped upside the head with this book.

"Perhaps such secrets, the secrets of everyone, were only expressed when the person laboriously dragged them into the light of the world, imposed them on the world, and made them a part of the world's experience. Without this effort, the secret place was merely a dungeon in which the person perished; without this effort, indeed, the entire world would be an uninhabitable darkness; and she saw, with a dreadful reluctance, why this effort was so rare." ...more

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Sep 04, 2009 Jamie rated it liked it · review of another edition

I really wanted to like this book, I did. My professor is, as she freely admits, "in love with James Baldwin," and I so hoped that I would be able to share in that wonderful book-loving glow. It was my first experience with Baldwin, and I've always heard such lovely things--I came at this with a lot of excitement. Unfortunately, I can't say by the end of it that I would align myself with Baldwin on an intellectual level--or even that I enjoyed the reading of it. In some ways, "Another Country" r I really wanted to like this book, I did. My professor is, as she freely admits, "in love with James Baldwin," and I so hoped that I would be able to share in that wonderful book-loving glow. It was my first experience with Baldwin, and I've always heard such lovely things--I came at this with a lot of excitement. Unfortunately, I can't say by the end of it that I would align myself with Baldwin on an intellectual level--or even that I enjoyed the reading of it. In some ways, "Another Country" reminded me of Radclyffe Hall's "The Well of Loneliness" (another 'gay classic' that crept, rather repulsively, under my skin). There's a sense that all of the characters in both novels are so self-loathing that their purportedly "doomed" subject positions become positively inescapable--when in fact, the characters are bringing this DOOMDOOMDOOM on themselves. This is not to say that I can't handle a book where the characters are despicable--but that I can't stand a book where the author presents them as such because of an undercurrent of fatalism. Hall was working under the auspices of the inversion theories of homosexuality, and so Stephen & co. felt imprisoned in their bodies/identities (and espoused a sort of 'body is destiny' theory of identity, to my mind).

Here, not only does Baldwin present race relations as invariably deadly (re: namely, Rufus, but also Ida's relationships with, well, everyone), but brings in a whole 'nother ballpark of problematic positions with this. There are, I truly believe, underlying strains of misogyny and internalized homophobia throughout the text; female characters are the ultimate figures of abjection (Cass, particularly, seems to believe she *deserves* her debasement); gay men are the 'handkerchiefs' that big macho men like Rufus and Vivaldo can wipe their cum up with without a passing regret. Again, I'm aware that voicing these positionalities creates a space for further dialogue, but my problem is that it seems Baldwin *advocates* these troubling ideas. Why are women and gay men invariably punished throughout the novel, while the 'straight' (?) men can more or less do anything they want without a care? (Call me on the Rufus example, because I can argue that further, but perhaps this review is growing too long.) Like Hall, it seems, Baldwin's seeming self-loathing (or at least discomfort with his own sexuality) may have bled too fully onto the narrative. And while my prof asked the class why everyone--within and outside of the novel--felt so drawn to Rufus' magnetism, the fact of the matter was that I didn't find him a particularly alluring figure at all. Others called him the "locus of desire" in the novel--but I found him to be an insufferable, womanizing, fatalist fucktard. And again, I get that Baldwin was trying to illuminate the conflicts that mandates against miscegenation create in the individual, but my problem was that he seemed to excuse sexualized and racialized violence against women by virtue of this conflict. In short, that ain't right.

I might give Baldwin another shot. I still want to pick up "Giovanni's Room," and the excerpts I've read from "Just Above My Head" seem much better than this novel. Oh, and that's another thing. There were moments where Baldwin's prose was spot-on, but there were long stretches of writing that seemed to me to have been peeled right off of the scabs of an undergraduate creative writing workshop. Sorry, friends, but this novel bugged the hell outta me. ...more

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