Another Country [Paperback]

To me, this book is amazing simply because James Baldwin is able to make a thirty year old midwestern girl feel as though she thoroughly knows and understands a fictional group of struggling and eclectic writers and musicians from 1960's New York City. With _Another Country_, so aptly titled because Rufus, Vivaldo, Cass, Richard, Eric and Ida each seem to have their own, Baldwin was also able to further open a mind I thought was pretty wide already.

Baldwin does not create a gradual buildup of tension and emotion. Instead he leaps almost immediately into a bellowing peak and stays there all the way through the conclusion, an ungraceful pace that brings to mind a recording by Celine Dion or Michael Bolton. This is a novel that could easily have descended into kitschy melodrama, and it's a tribute to Baldwin's talent as a writer that he somehow weaves enough subtlety and complexity into the characters and events to maintain some sort of balance.

Some themes are reoccurring: knowing and seeing vs. willful blindness, friendship vs. betrayal, art as a profession vs. art for its own sake, and the impassable chasm of the racial divide. Other themes are less clear, especially when it comes to love. All of the characters in Another Country burn bright, and they love in a way that is all-consuming. No one writes love and sex like James Baldwin, and these scenes make an impact. The contradiction comes in the casual disregard for fidelity that these same characters show. Is Baldwin making the point that love, when so passionately felt, is an overwhelming burden that chases the lovers into other arms? Is it that we as humans are afraid of happiness and that we seek to destroy situations in which we truly would be happy? Is it that love is a weak bond next to the relentless persecution of the outer world? Looking at the characters and their actions, none of these explanations seem to stick; the reader simply ends up feeling jerked around, in that the emotions and passions narrated in the thoughts of the characters are so very often directly contradicted by the same character's actions in the very next scene.

The one theme that seems to clearly emerge is one of victimization. Baldwin paints a world in which no one is responsible for their own actions, and all of the characters see themselves headed towards their destruction. The characters feel helpless to steer their own fates, even to control their own violent and destructive actions (towards themselves and others). This isn't just a self-fulfilling prophecy - they don't destroy themselves simply because they believe themselves destined to fail; Baldwin actually seems to create a world in which no one can win. This conclusion struck me not only as bleak, but as a bit wrong-headed.

Another Country has a five star opening and a three star follow-up. There are passages of brilliance throughout the book, but I finished this wishing that Rufus's story had been told as a novella or a short story, and that the exploits of the other characters in the last two thirds of the book were left to the imagination of the reader.