I expected this book to be about sexuality and Paris, in the way perhaps that A Moveable Feast is, or any of the other million Paris-based love stories. Honestly, I should have known better. It is kind of about sexuality! But it’s also about so many other things that by the end of the book I had stopped thinking about it as a love story at all.
On the second page or so, we already know that our protagonist, David, is in Paris, but about to leave. His lover Giovanni is about to be executed; his fiancée is en route to America. Things are not good! After this heavy intro, Baldwin jumps around in time to fill in the chronological gaps: when did he meet Giovanni, what has his fiancée been doing this whole time, where did he get these ideas about himself that he keeps trying to outrun? The main narrative is about David’s ill-fated affair with Giovanni, and how even in the headiness of a deep Parisian affair, David simply cannot let it be, he cannot love without shame. His inability to come to terms with this leads, eventually, to everything falling apart.
Baldwin is very careful that David’s shame is not associated with homosexuality. Instead, it is his, and his alone – maybe from his family upbringing, maybe from American society, whatever. Of course, his relationship with his sexuality is informed by his family and society, so it’s all a bit of a mess. Notably, both main characters are white, although I frequently forgot this because the America that Baldwin is critiquing is, of course, inherently a racist one.
Let’s talk about American society a little more! Baldwin has A LOT TO SAY about it!
Americans should never come to Europe, she says. “It means they never can be happy again. What’s the good of an American who isn’t happy? Happiness was all we had.”
Baldwin is famously critical of American’s belief in its own perpetual renewal; in other words, America always believes in its own innocence:
“Oh please,” I said. “I don’t believe that. Time’s not water and we’re not fish and you can choose not to be eaten and also not to eat – not to eat,” I added quickly, turning a little red before his delighted and sardonic smile, “the little fish, of course.” “To choose!” cried Giovanni, turning his face away from me … “To choose!” He turned to me again. “Ah, you are really an American.”
Really enjoyed this take and i can’t figure out how to say it better, so here it is:
American happiness is this peculiar innocence, then, the belief that one can choose, and without great sacrifice or cost, to be good, by which I mean to be exempt from necessity, to move through the world without causing harm. This is what David loses, and perhaps emphasising this loss is the most important effect of Baldwin’s beginning the novel where he does, at the end, with David lost in a kind of moral nakedness.
To fit this massive, specific critique into such a slim, readable novel, is such an accomplishment. Maybe it goes without saying but this isn’t a book for warm fuzzy feelings; it is a book for an unflinching examination of America’s hang-ups, which, apparently, haven’t changed all that much since 1956.