On James Baldwin

Novelist Tóibín (Long Island) serves up a loving tribute to Baldwin in this incisive critical study. Placing Baldwin in conversation with other authors, Tóibín compares Baldwin’s and James Joyce’s first novels (Go Tell It on the Mountain and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, respectively), arguing that in both the authors present “versions of themselves as young men dealing with family” and their ambivalent relationships with religion. Baldwin “had it in for easy and fixed categories,” Tóibín contends, tracing how characters in Another Country chafe against the constraints of racial and masculine norms. Tóibín suggests that the novel’s imagining of a hypothetical place “where there were no definitions of any kind, neither of color nor of male or female” constitutes Baldwin’s idea of liberation. Elsewhere, Tóibín likens the muted romance between the gay émigré protagonists of Giovanni’s Room to his own flings with men while living in Barcelona in the 1970s, suggesting that both attest to how a lack of spaces accepting of gay people can constrain the flourishing of love. These astute essays are doubly rewarding, shedding light on Baldwin’s profound visions of freedom while offering insight into how Tóibín reads and thinks about fiction. The result is a testament to the talents of both writers. (Aug.)