seebrandyread 's review for:

Going to Meet the Man by James Baldwin

4.0

challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Complicated

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

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James Baldwin’s only book of short fiction, Going to Meet the Man, contains eight stories about race, adolescence, family, violence, love, and more in the first half of the 20th century. His characters face the social distresses of time, place, and their own dysfunctional families. Young boys and men appear often in the collection either as protagonists or focal points of a story as part of the collection’s main theme of psychological development. The answers to why some of his adult characters feel and act the way they do can be found in the lives of his younger characters. An undercurrent of violence flows through every story. Whether a child fears his father’s punishment or explicit acts are perpetrated, the feeling that something terrible is about to happen bubbles tensely under the surface and on the page. Baldwin writes deeply and poetically about the inner lives of all his characters, but that's the main way we learn about the ones who don’t quite know how to interact with the outside world yet and struggle to process the interactions they do have. I wondered if this in any way mirror’s Baldwin’s own journey to understand himself and his relationship to the outside world. This understanding of the self is at the center of the book. Each character is trying to come face-to-face with who they are or are becoming, to cut through all the fog and conflicting narratives of who the rest of the world is telling them they are in order to know their own hearts no matter the darkness within.