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A review by nelsonminar
Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
4.0
I'm conflicted about this book. It's beautifully written and full of nuance. It's also a product from a homophobic past that is becoming hard to remember or imagine. It almost feels in a category like Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a book from a past, worse time. But while I hated reading that book recently I did really love the sensitivity of Giovanni's Room. Still conflicted.
First, the good and beautiful thing. The emotional nuance of the book is so complex. The simultaneous love and hatred and self-hatred the protagonist David feels on falling into a relationship with Giovanni, it's just heart-breaking and subtle and very sensitively narrated. "there opened in me a hatred for Giovanni which was as powerful as my love and which was nourished by the same roots." That ambiguity David feels in his loves is the core of the power of the book for me, Baldwin himself spoke of it as "what happens if you are so afraid that you finally cannot love anybody". What an awful yet real emotion.
Second, the basic solid structure of the novel. Baldwin's a masterful writer. It's a lovely novel about Americans in post-war Paris. The narrative structure is great. I particularly like the inversion of time where all the details of the story are told to us up front and then the novel is just explaining how it all unfolded and the emotional impact of it. And I appreciate that Baldwin manages to even make Hella a real character at the end, something he was dangerously close to not doing: her taking agency and declaring "There are women who have forgotten that to be a woman doesn’t simply mean humiliation, doesn’t simply mean bitterness. I haven’t forgotten it yet" was excellent.
And third, the part I hated. This whole book is about gay shame. David's shame in early homosexual experiences, his shame at being in love with Giovanni, his intense contempt for the "fairies" of the Paris demi-monde, even his shameful rebound trick with a sailor who humiliates him. David is consumed by self loathing and homophobia that he never overcomes, it destroys him. It's awful.
So here's the thing. In 1956 that was an incredibly brave and rare thing to write in a novel; it is literally one of the first works of American fiction that tells a homosexual story from an informed viewpoint. The shame is conveyed sympathetically, it's the entire intent of the book. But it's also just so depressing. My unhappiness about that may be tinged by my expectations going in; I was looking for some uplifting gay fiction to read for Pride month. That's definitely not this book.
I also wonder if this gay shame is harder to relate to in 2021. At least I hope it is. This book is very important to a lot of my older gay men friends, folks born in the 60s and 70s, because they saw themselves in the book and it gave them solace or companionship or at least a way to think about their own internalized homophobia. That's great! I only just read it now, at age 50, and I just find the shame upsetting. And I wonder for a young man born in the year 2000 whether this books makes sense as anything other than a historical document. I kind of hope it doesn't. It is an excellent historical document, well written, but based on a crisis of gay shame that is hard to imagine in the contemporary world. At least I do hope we've come that far.
Postscript: one other aspect of the book I was unprepared for, there's almost no African-American perspective in this. I know Baldwin as one of America's great Black writers so I was surprised to be reading this novel entirely about white people. Nothing wrong with that! Just a surprise in our contemporary era of intersectionality and highlighting minority perspectives. Baldwin did that on purpose and spoke about it: ‘‘I certainly could not possibly have—not at that point in my life—handled the other great weight, the ‘Negro problem.’ The sexual-moral light was a hard thing to deal with. I could not handle both propositions in the same book. There was no room for it.’’ Fair enough, he is not obligated to be my Negro. Also as Greenwell's essay in the Guardian notes, Baldwin's Black experience is definitely present in the novel even if not explicitly the center of it.
That's a lot of words for a Goodreads review. Some of these were written after being informed by some recent articles, contemporary literary criticism. They may be good reading:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/19/james-baldwin-giovannis-room-garth-greenwell-60th-anniversary-gay-novel
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/05/t-magazine/james-baldwin-giovannis-room.html
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-unsparing-confessions-of-giovannis-room
Update: I shared this review with two gay friends who both commented that shame is absolutely still a problem for LGBT people in America, including gay boys and young men growing up and finding themselves. I apologize for breezily dismissing that, I still feel remnants of internalized homophobia in myself! But the shame in _Giovanni's Room_ is so blunt and overwhelming I didn't connect to it, maybe thanks to years of practice with gay pride. Anyway, I don't want to dismiss anyone who finds a connection to the shame Baldwin describes in his book. And he describes it incredibly eloquently, it resonates whether it's intensely personal or just a historical memory.
First, the good and beautiful thing. The emotional nuance of the book is so complex. The simultaneous love and hatred and self-hatred the protagonist David feels on falling into a relationship with Giovanni, it's just heart-breaking and subtle and very sensitively narrated. "there opened in me a hatred for Giovanni which was as powerful as my love and which was nourished by the same roots." That ambiguity David feels in his loves is the core of the power of the book for me, Baldwin himself spoke of it as "what happens if you are so afraid that you finally cannot love anybody". What an awful yet real emotion.
Second, the basic solid structure of the novel. Baldwin's a masterful writer. It's a lovely novel about Americans in post-war Paris. The narrative structure is great. I particularly like the inversion of time where all the details of the story are told to us up front and then the novel is just explaining how it all unfolded and the emotional impact of it. And I appreciate that Baldwin manages to even make Hella a real character at the end, something he was dangerously close to not doing: her taking agency and declaring "There are women who have forgotten that to be a woman doesn’t simply mean humiliation, doesn’t simply mean bitterness. I haven’t forgotten it yet" was excellent.
And third, the part I hated. This whole book is about gay shame. David's shame in early homosexual experiences, his shame at being in love with Giovanni, his intense contempt for the "fairies" of the Paris demi-monde, even his shameful rebound trick with a sailor who humiliates him. David is consumed by self loathing and homophobia that he never overcomes, it destroys him. It's awful.
So here's the thing. In 1956 that was an incredibly brave and rare thing to write in a novel; it is literally one of the first works of American fiction that tells a homosexual story from an informed viewpoint. The shame is conveyed sympathetically, it's the entire intent of the book. But it's also just so depressing. My unhappiness about that may be tinged by my expectations going in; I was looking for some uplifting gay fiction to read for Pride month. That's definitely not this book.
I also wonder if this gay shame is harder to relate to in 2021. At least I hope it is. This book is very important to a lot of my older gay men friends, folks born in the 60s and 70s, because they saw themselves in the book and it gave them solace or companionship or at least a way to think about their own internalized homophobia. That's great! I only just read it now, at age 50, and I just find the shame upsetting. And I wonder for a young man born in the year 2000 whether this books makes sense as anything other than a historical document. I kind of hope it doesn't. It is an excellent historical document, well written, but based on a crisis of gay shame that is hard to imagine in the contemporary world. At least I do hope we've come that far.
Postscript: one other aspect of the book I was unprepared for, there's almost no African-American perspective in this. I know Baldwin as one of America's great Black writers so I was surprised to be reading this novel entirely about white people. Nothing wrong with that! Just a surprise in our contemporary era of intersectionality and highlighting minority perspectives. Baldwin did that on purpose and spoke about it: ‘‘I certainly could not possibly have—not at that point in my life—handled the other great weight, the ‘Negro problem.’ The sexual-moral light was a hard thing to deal with. I could not handle both propositions in the same book. There was no room for it.’’ Fair enough, he is not obligated to be my Negro. Also as Greenwell's essay in the Guardian notes, Baldwin's Black experience is definitely present in the novel even if not explicitly the center of it.
That's a lot of words for a Goodreads review. Some of these were written after being informed by some recent articles, contemporary literary criticism. They may be good reading:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/19/james-baldwin-giovannis-room-garth-greenwell-60th-anniversary-gay-novel
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/05/t-magazine/james-baldwin-giovannis-room.html
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-unsparing-confessions-of-giovannis-room
Update: I shared this review with two gay friends who both commented that shame is absolutely still a problem for LGBT people in America, including gay boys and young men growing up and finding themselves. I apologize for breezily dismissing that, I still feel remnants of internalized homophobia in myself! But the shame in _Giovanni's Room_ is so blunt and overwhelming I didn't connect to it, maybe thanks to years of practice with gay pride. Anyway, I don't want to dismiss anyone who finds a connection to the shame Baldwin describes in his book. And he describes it incredibly eloquently, it resonates whether it's intensely personal or just a historical memory.