A review by korrick
Another Country by James Baldwin

4.0

Perhaps now, though, he had hit bottom. One thing about the bottom, he told himself, you can't fall any farther. He tried to take comfort from this thought. Yet there knocked in his heart the suspicion that the bottom did not really exist.

"I'd like to prove to her—one day," he said; and paused. He looked out of the window. "I'd like to make her know that the world's not as black as she thinks it is."
"Or," she said, dryly, after a moment, "as white."

Previous to Another Country, all my Baldwin was short and first person, whether nonfiction or otherwise. The work doesn't feel as anachronistic as it did when I started, but still: multiple characters careening over landscapes of fucking and cheating and exiling and killing in a half serious, half soap opera fashion is not a Baldwin I'm familiar with. It's not that it's bad, per se, but that Baldwin applying himself to a formula found more often in pop fiction makes the average specimen of such look even trashier than it did previously. Even the more quality examples fail to measure up in one respect or another, whether it be the tackling of intersecting bigotries, the shaping of the landscapes within a person, or the simple matter of well crafted prose. It's not as if I've been actively seeking out drama-heavy narrative fiction worth my time (the exact opposite, in fact), but even the best of those aren't guaranteed to result in a raising of standards so well supported that I can almost feel the tangible levers and pulleys clicking in my skull to a higher notch. I wouldn't say I knew for a fact reading Baldwin would result in such, but it's always nice when hunches are rewarded.

It was a city without oases, run entirely, insofar, at least, as human perception could tell, for money; and its citizens seemed to have lost entirely any sense of their right to renew themselves.

Whiteness. Masculinity. Heteronormativity. Misogynoir. Rape culture. Even a bit of anti-capitalism based on a few quotes if looked at in the proper fashion. The majority of it US-centric, the minority of it equipped with closure, the latter to the point that a user's suggestion that the first 80 or so pages composed a novella made complete sense in a Baldwinesque fashion, home of the short stories and letters and less than 200 page pieces of work. With Baldwin, one usually doesn't question whether something need 'entertain' in a realm whose apolitical nature renders it nonexistent. As such, a reader is free to witness rather than watch, to become enraptured rather than insensate, to cut themselves on the dividing lines that have wound their way from a 1960's writing to a 2010's living rather than to assure themselves that that was then and we have come so much farther now.

All of the people in Ellis' world approached each other under cover of a manner designed to hide whatever they might really be feeling, about each other or about themselves. When confronted with Ida, who was so visibly rejected from the only world they knew, this manner was forced to become relatively personal, self-conscious, and tense. It became entangled with an effort to avoid being called into judgment; with a fear that their spiritual and social promissory notes might suddenly be called up. By being pressed into the service of an impulse that was real, the manner revealed itself as totally false and because it was it was false, it was sinister.

For all its positives, AC made the mistake [b:The Memory of Love|7784648|The Memory of Love|Aminatta Forna|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1421228169s/7784648.jpg|10719873] did: the interiority of the white man, the interiority of the black man, the interiority of the white woman, and yet, for whatever reason, the black woman remained an enigma without a chance at the vaunted close third-person perspective. The character in question was hardly silent, but there is a world of difference between hearing one speak and coming so close to a persona as to let the admittance of having participated in a gang rape take on the note of necessary confession. In comparison, sex work receives its usual paint job of shameful titillation, even to the point of implication that it was indirect contact with it, not having committed rape, that caused one character to lose their innocence. A powerful work, but much as I hold authors to a higher standard because of Baldwin, I hold Baldwin to an even higher one because of what else he's written.

He raised his eyes to heaven. He thought, You bastard, you motherfucking bastard. Ain't I your baby, too?