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A review by johnaggreyodera
James Baldwin: Early Novels & Stories by James Baldwin
4.0
Reviewing Baldwin puts you in that weird zone where you are implicitly outcasted if your review is anything but an additional voice in the sea of universal acclamation. But at risk of this outcasting, I thought it was a perfectly alright book, not mind blowing and not positively mediocre. That said, perhaps the weight of it lay in the subject Baldwin decided to tackle - homosexuality - and seeing as I live in the second decade of the twenty first century, where being gay is thankfully seen as a normal variation in how people lead their lives (like the different clothes they wear or the different accents they have) and not in the 1950s - when Baldwin was writing this, and when being gay was classified as a mental illness according to the DSM - or even in the 1980s, when the AIDS crisis ravaged the gay community, and they were even further outcasted by straight society, perhaps this is why I don’t appreciate the book as much.
I also found it interesting that Baldwin decided to make the protagonist a white man. I later read in an interview that Baldwin himself claimed that to tackle two giant targets of American discrimination- queerness and blackness- would be too much to do in one novel. But because “intersectionality” is in everyone’s minds right now, I can’t help but wonder whether the point is just that Baldwin didn’t think that the nexus of queerness and blackness, was, perhaps for primarily economic reasons (one reason why we write books is to sell them after all) a good selling point. Was it that if it the book had been about a black, queer man (I.e. Baldwin himself) black people wouldn’t have bought it because of their homophobia and white people because of their racism??
I also found it interesting that Baldwin decided to make the protagonist a white man. I later read in an interview that Baldwin himself claimed that to tackle two giant targets of American discrimination- queerness and blackness- would be too much to do in one novel. But because “intersectionality” is in everyone’s minds right now, I can’t help but wonder whether the point is just that Baldwin didn’t think that the nexus of queerness and blackness, was, perhaps for primarily economic reasons (one reason why we write books is to sell them after all) a good selling point. Was it that if it the book had been about a black, queer man (I.e. Baldwin himself) black people wouldn’t have bought it because of their homophobia and white people because of their racism??