"Another Country" by James Baldwin

 Greenwich Village, New York ("that city which the people from heaven had made their home." - 3.2), late 1950s. Rufus is a black jazz drummer in a love-hate relationship on a downward spiral with a white girl from Georgia. Other characters include Rufus's sister Ida who wants to be a singer Vivaldo, a wannabe novelist of Italian extraction, Richard, an older novelist and his wife Cass, and Eric a gay actor with a French boyfriend. These artists live a bohemian life but at the bottom of it all they yearn for love; but love involves another person and that creates problematic power dynamics, especially when there is the complication of race.

A deeply troubling analysis of inner city life and the problems involved when a boy meets a girl (or a boy). Baldwin's other books include Giovanni's Room, a masterful treatment of repressed homosexuality, Go Tell it on the Mountain, about a young black street preacher, and If Beale Street Could Talk, a superb novel about racism. This novel seems to encompass all three. His characters leap off the page in their brutal glory. His settings both shape and resonate for the characters.  This is writing at its best. 

Wikipedia says that in Baldwin's writing "Themes of masculinity, sexuality, race, and class intertwine to create intricate narratives." That certainly describes this classic novel.

Colm Toibin, writing in the Introduction to this Penguin Classic edition, calls Another Country "the essential American drama of the century in which characters desperately seek to escape from the parody of themselves which has been constructed for them." 

Selected quotes:

Fantastic descriptions:

• "The wind nibbled delightedly at him through his summer slacks." (1.1)
• "The music was loud and empty ... and it was being hurled at the crowd like a malediction." (1.1)
• "Bloodless people cannot be made to bleed." (1.1)
• "Silence rang its mighty gongs in the room behind her." (2.4)
• "He came through the doors behind a great cloud of windy, rainy, broad-beamed ladies; and they formed, before him, a large, loud, rocking wall, as they shook their umbrellas and themselves and repeated to each other, in their triumphant voices, how awful the weather was." (3.1)
• "The rain had ceased, in the blue-black sky a few stars were scattered, and the wind roughly jostled the clouds along." (3.1)

Tremendous insights:

• "They were the prey that was no longer hunted, though they were scarcely aware of this condition and could not bear to leave the place where they had first been spoiled." (1.1)
• "In any of the world's cities, on a winter night, a boy can be bought for the price of a beer and the promise of warm blankets." (1.1)
• "We've all been up the same streets. There aren't a hell of a lot of streets." (1.1)
• "A lot of people say that a man who takes his own life oughtn't to be buried in holy ground. ... All I know, God made every bit of ground I ever walked on and everything God made is holy." (1.2)
• "If the world wasn't so full of dead folks maybe those of us that's trying to live wouldn't have to suffer so bad." (1.2)
• "The best that he ever managed in bed, so far, had been the maximum of relief with the minimum of hostility." (1.3)
• "Strangers' faces hold no secrets because the imagination does not invest them with any." (1.3)
• "Only time might help, time which surrendered all secrets but only on the inexorable condition, as far as he could tell, that the secret could no longer be used." (2.1)
• "The trouble with a secret life it that it is very frequently a secret from the person who lives it and not at all a secret for the people he encounters." (2.1)
• "He had the tendency of all wildly disorganised people to suppose that the lives of others were tamer and less sensual and more cerebral than his own." (2.3)
• "You want to find out what's happening, baby, all you got to do is pay your dues!" (2.3)
• "All policemen were bright enough to know who they were working for and they were not working, anywhere in the world, for the powerless." (2.3)
• "It was a city without oases, run entirely, insofar, at least, as human perception could tell, for money." (2.4)
• "Wouldn't you hate all white people if they kept you in prison here? ... Kept you here, and stunted you and starved you, and made you watch your mother and father and sister and lover and brother and son and daughter die or go mad or go under, before your very eyes? And not in a hurry, like from one day to the next, but, every day, every day, for years, for generations? Shit. They keep you here because you're black, while they go jerking themselves off with all the jazz about the land of the free." (2.4)
• "It was the boy who led - indisputably - and the girl who followed; but it also came, more profoundly, from the fact that the girl was, in no sense, appalled by the boy and did not for an instant hesitate to answer his rudest quiver with her own." (2.4)

Wonderful writing. January 2023; 425 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God