I have to say yet again that I know I read James Baldwin’s fiction in school at some point; but, in the years since undergrad, I have returned more to his non-fiction time after time. I have watched his interviews on YouTube (one of my favorites is “The Moral Responsibility of the Artist”) and seen the film I Am Not Your Negro by Raoul Peck documenting Baldwin’s perspective as a Black man and public figure experiencing the terror of the United States in the mid-1900s. His words in these works have profoundly shaped the way I understand race in the United States. That being said, I left his fictional works sitting on my bookshelves for a long time. Until now.
If I have read a novel that captures the cruelty of love more than Giovanni’s Room, then I can’t remember it right now. I have just finished reading it as I write this and all I can think is what kind of cruelty did Baldwin experience in love that led him to write like this?
I have also to confess that I haven’t read any criticism of this work — no secondary resources. I mostly just recall the majority of conversations about this book discussing its role as an early and groundbreaking work centering LGBTQIA+ identity. And no doubt that is true. As I was reading it, I kept thinking what it must have been like to come across a novel so openly queer in 1956. Yet, for me that was secondary to the love story at play. The characters at the center are lost, without homes, without trusted family or friends. They are looking for those things in one another, but they will not find them.
The entire narrative is told from the perspective of David, a closeted gay, white American man whose own self-hatred spills out on to the people he loves most, whether it is Hella, the woman he is trying to love, or Giovanni, the man he is trying not to love. In both cases, David’s refusal to be honest with himself; his refusal to deal with his own fear; his own vulnerability, devastates and destroys Hella and Giovanni. They destroy themselves trying to reach him, but, he is unreachable, even to himself. In the most selfish way possible, he lets Hella and Giovanni love him. He lets them show themselves and their vulnerability to him over and over again, but gives absolutely nothing back; ultimately, driving both of them away. But, perhaps, the worst part is the end. And yes, I know this book is almost 70 years old and there is probably no need to worry about spoilers because chances are whoever is reading this already knows something of the book, but I still won’t talk so much about the ending as much as how maddening it is to spend so much time with a character who is so cut off from his own body; his own reality that all that is left is a cold, cruelty that regardless of what churns inside, reveals absolutely nothing. There is no catharsis. No revenge. Only a blank face and empty eyes.
Patricia Marie Perea 