James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”

Jenks, editor and cofounder of Narrative magazine, debuts with a thorough close reading of James Baldwin’s 1957 short story “Sonny’s Blues,” which follows a Harlem algebra teacher as he struggles to reconnect with his estranged brother, a heroin user and gifted jazz pianist. Moving sentence by sentence through the story, Jenks highlights the musicality of the diction, as when he breaks down the phrase “God knows why”: “God its glottal G exhaling the short o sounding ah/awe into the commanding palatal d is a bass note springing to and holding under the bright round opening of knows.” Dissecting the story’s motifs, Jenks contends that Baldwin uses windows both literally as “stage blocking” and metaphorically as “portals of vision” that provide “occasions of perception and perspective, greater or lesser degrees of clarity.” Elsewhere, Jenks explores the story’s ambivalent portrayal of faith, dramatized by the contrast between Sonny’s devout mother and her skeptical sons, and contends that Sonny’s climactic piano performance, in which he falters early on before finding his groove, echoes Baldwin’s evolution as a writer. Jenks’s reverence for the story and for Baldwin’s gift with language enlivens the admittedly granular analysis, imparting the feeling of sitting in on a beloved professor’s lecture. It’s an erudite testament to the pleasures of savoring a text. (Oct.)