Giovanni's Room, by James Baldwin

Originally published on Josh Friedlander's Goodreads Reviews.

Drenched in gloom and squalor;  Emily in Paris this is not. (Closer perhaps to Down and Out in Paris and London). An American expat in Paris, running away from a messy home life and complicated relationship with his father, and with a vague need to "find himself" ("an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced"), falls into an affair with an Italian bartender. That the narrator, David, is white is alluded to only once, in the opening paragraph:

My ancestors conquered a continent, pushing across death-laden plains, until they came to an ocean which faced away from Europe into a darker past.

It's an interesting choice, which Baldwin explained as out of necessity, not being able to challenge the reading public with a hero both black and gay (this coming out soon after the semi-autobiographical Go Tell it on the Mountain). But making David an all-American blonde WASP also underlines his internal conflict, his self-hatred which he takes out on his lover Giovanni, his disgust for the titular (grimy, dim, claustrophobic) room; he always feels that he has a nobler and better life somewhere else, and the central tension of the book is his realisation that he doesn't.

"I would not like to go to Italy - perhaps, after all, for the same reason you do not want to go to the United States."

"But I am going to the United States," I said, quickly. And he looked at me. "I mean, I'm certainly going to go back there one of these days."

"One of these days," he said. "Everything bad will happen - one of these days."

"Why is it bad?"

He smiled, "Why, you will go home and then you will find that home is not home anymore. Then you will really be in trouble. As long as you stay here, you can always think: One day I will go home." He played with my thumb and grinned. "N'est-ce pas?"

"Beautiful logic," I said. "You mean I have a home to go to as long as I don't go there?"

He laughed. "Well, isn't it true? You don't have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back."

(Which reminds me of an explanation I once read about why we procrastinate, that to do something in time would require you to do your best effort and thus have no way of explaining any shortcomings in it, whereas rushing it in at the last minute lets you feel that you have only partly invested in it, and could have done better.) Another way to read the book, I guess, is as a portrayal of how anxiety and repressed trauma can prevent people from forming healthy relationships, as they are unable to separate the object of love from their own self-directed feelings of guilt and inadequacy. (This was apparently a reading that Baldwin encouraged.)

Ok, final point: I guess I have an overactive work ethic but I find it really hard to read books about people who spend their lives hanging out in bars and "borrowing" money from wealthy friends. Get a job!