Book Review: Giovanni’s Room

[osprey_archer]

I mentioned in the Wednesday Reading Meme that I wanted to read some James Baldwin, and my own particular library branch happened to have Giovanni’s Room on hand, so I checked it out… and now I have read it and I am crushed and emotionally compromised.

(Although the Everyman’s Library edition has a black man on the cover, the main character and in fact the entire cast is white. The introduction quotes Baldwin’s comment, “I certainly could not possibly have - not at that point in my life - handled the other great weight, the ‘Negro problem.’ The sexual-moral light was a hard thing to deal with. I could not handle both propositions in the same book.” I feel a cover with two white guys staring at each other in an intensely homoerotic yet antagonistic manner would more closely fit the book’s actual content.)

The novel, set in the 1950s when it was written, tells the story of David, an American who has gone to Paris in order to run away from/embrace his homosexuality. These are, you will note, opposite actions; he oscillates between the two, and does both badly. (And it should be noted that by “embrace” I don’t mean “emotionally accept,” I definitely just mean that he keeps banging guys.)

This sort of doubling is shot through David’s character. He is attracted to Giovanni, and hence repulsed by him (because repulsed by his own attraction to men); he loves Giovanni and hates him, he wants to stay with him and feels that he is suffocating in Giovanni’s room. Although the effect is most pronounced in relationship to his attraction to men, this alienation from his own feelings - alienation is maybe not strong enough; it’s a loathing, an antagonism, and it infects everything else in his life, all his relationships, all his actions, his ability to feel anything wholeheartedly or sincerely.

Giovanni’s Room put me in mind of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, another book with a narrator so crushed by his own internalized homophobia that he can barely admit even to himself that he’s attracted to men. (Also, the boyfriend character in both books is about 10,000 times more in touch with his emotions than that narrator, and in particular more capable of experiencing genuine joy when the circumstances allow.)

But Giovanni’s Room is much darker (and The Goldfinch is not exactly a walk in the park!) In The Goldfinch, the other characters realize that Theo is an adorable human dumpster fire; in Giovanni’s Room, both Giovanni (David’s boyfriend) and Hella (his fiancee) have nothing like this level of insight into David. They take him as he presents himself, and because he has fragmented himself so aggressively, this gives them nothing like the complete picture.

Hella does not know that David is gay; he is, after all, trying very hard to hide it. Giovanni, meanwhile - well, Giovanni is the bartender at a gay bar where David goes because he is “intent on proving, to them and to myself, that I was not of their company. I did this by being in their company a great deal and manifesting toward all of them a tolerance which placed me, I believed, above suspicion.”

But of course Giovanni isn’t aware of this tortured rationale. He figures that David’s just looking for a boyfriend, a take that David seems to corroborate by moving into Giovanni’s room and making love to him and basically mooching off him all summer. (This is especially egregious because David comes from an almost infinitely more comfortable background than Giovanni, who is barely scraping by.) Only far too late does Giovanni realize that David will not and perhaps cannot love Giovanni for more than the most fleeting of instants, when that feeling overwhelms David’s carefully constructed armor.

This all makes David sound absolutely awful, and, let’s be clear: he is awful. You can’t even trot out “Well but he’s even WORSE to himself than to other people,” because as awful as he is to himself, the consequences of David's awfulness are far worse for Giovanni than anything that happens to David. (This isn’t a spoiler; we learn that Giovanni’s about to be guillotined on about page three.)

But at the same time, David is so vividly, mercilessly drawn, this mixture of harshly repressed tenderness and self-protective cruelty, that I found the book terribly compelling and… not hard to put down, exactly, I did keep putting it down because it was hard to read about such sadness. But I kept having to pick it back up.

Comments

[asakiyume]

... literally guillotined? *checks internet* ... whoa, they kept that up until 1977.

[osprey_archer]

You would think that after the excesses of the French Revolution, the French might have backed off from the whole guillotine thing and started hanging criminals like normal people, BUT NO, I guess they felt the guillotine was iconic and they might as well hold onto it.

[sovay]

Although the Everyman’s Library edition has a black man on the cover, the main character and in fact the entire cast is white.

Chester Himes' Yesterday Will Make You Cry (1998)—written in 1937, eventually published in 1952 in much-censored form as Cast the First Stone, finally restored to its original text after the author's death—has a case of this. It's a brilliant, partly autobiographical queer prison novel with a black author and a white protagonist; the suspects in the lineup on the cover are all black men.

[osprey_archer]

It's kind of a weird inverse of the problem where publishers whitewash the cover because they think that will sell better; in this case they seem to be going, well, the writer is black, so the book MUST be about black people!!! And with Giovanni's Room in particular, there is nothing at all about the cover that suggests... well, anything about the content of the book; it's just a black man looking straight out at the audience.

Publishers could do themselves a lot of favors if they just embraced a truth-in-advertising philosophy for covers.

[missroserose]

It probably says a lot about me that I'm actually much more interested in reading this now that you've described it so vividly (up until now I've mostly been familiar with Baldwin's essay work), though I have a feeling I'd find it just as difficult going. It sounds pretty mercilessly clear-eyed about its protagonist's emotional state and how that affects everyone around him.

[osprey_archer]

"Mercilessly clear-eyed" is a good way to describe it. It's an amazing book, but tragic and emotionally intense. Not light reading!

[evelyn_b]

David is awful and his strategy for proving that he isn't gay is poorly thought-out. Poor Giovanni is also a little awful, though more obviously vulnerable. My cover image is just an arty photograph of empty glasses on a table, but I admit that the first few times David's blondeness came up, I realized that I had been picturing a young James Baldwin again.

[osprey_archer]

HDU Giovanni is a baby angel and can do no wrong! (Actually I am sure he has done many wrong things, including abandoning his wife just after their baby died???? Why, Giovanni... But also I can understand that people sometimes do things in paroxysms of grief that otherwise they would not do.)

But I really felt for him, because he's so generous with David, both emotionally and also in terms of letting David live in his room and paying all their expenses etc... and the moment David gets his hands on some money he's out of the room like a shot, cavorting with Hella. At least give Giovanni some money, dude! The whole murder thing need never have happened if he'd given Giovanni seem money to tide him over till he found a new job.

I found David's strategy for proving he isn't gay darkly hilarious, in a "What did you EXPECT would happen?" kind of way. Talk about tempting fate.

[evelyn_b]

But David can't possibly give Giovanni money because 1) giving young guys money is what REPULSIVE SAD OLD QUEENS do and if David gave Giovanni money it would prove he was DOOMED TO BE JUST LIKE THEM FOREVER, and 2) even if he could trick himself into pretending he thought he was just helping out a friend like normal straight guys do all the time probably, it would still be admitting that he felt responsibility for Giovanni on any level and we can't have that. To give is to acknowledge a need.

if you don't tempt fate you can't prove it was never fate, besides it's not a temptation if you're COMPLETELY HETEROSEXUAL so what's the harm? Only the STRAIGHTEST OF MEN would hang out in a gay bar every night going, "ha ha ha look how not threatened I am" over endless cognacs because he is 1000% secure in his straightness. It makes perfect sense! (it's also darkly hilarious).

I love this book. No one does endlessly spiraling convolution like Baldwin. What did you think of poor Hella's speeches about womanhood?

[osprey_archer]

IT'S TRUE, if he gave Giovanni money there would clearly be nothing standing in between him and becoming Guillaume. There is no logical flaw in this reasoning! At least not by the standards of David Logic, by which you prove that you are Extremely Straight by hanging out at gay bars all the time.

POOR HELLA, she has picked absolutely the wrong guy to have her crisis about womanhood at, David is not only completely unhelpful but probably just leaves her more confused than before. I really felt for her when she told him, "Don't you see how unjust it was to wait for me to find it out? To put all the burden on me? I had the right to expect to hear from you - women are always waiting for the man to speak. Or hadn't you heard?"

I'm not sure why she's approaching this from the angle of "women are always waiting for the man to speak" rather than "how could you plan to marry me without divulging this enormous fact about your identity that would undermine our entire marriage," but even though it's a weird flex, she's so right that he should have told her. Her story is less tragic than Giovanni's because she has more resources - she can afford to hop on a boat and head back home - but David didn't treat her much better. (In fact, it occurs to me that he ditches her all alone in their rented house without warning just the same way he ditches Giovanni in his room. DAVID. Wasn't once enough?)

[evelyn_b]

Ouch, yes, that's the killer thrust, and very accurate. David wants everyone around him to do the work of defining him so he doesn't have to look, poor squeamish douchepuddle.

Hella's speeches about what being a woman means were the point at which I got the most detatched from the text, or the most aware of Baldwin's running a lecture series out of the mouths of his characters, but she does still manage to be both perceptive and sympathetic. Her Baldwinest line, if not her best, is probably "What's the good of an American who isn't happy? Happiness was all we had."

anyway I'm about to become a James Baldwin completist; too bad the library isn't open yet!

[osprey_archer]

I may not manage to become a Baldwin completist (he wrote so much! So many essay collections!) but I have designs on reading all of his novels, at least. A copy of Go Tell It on the Mountain floated into the library yesterday and I snapped it up.