Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin

I remember that life in that room seemed to be occurring beneath the sea. Time flowed past indifferently above us; hours and days had no meaning. In the beginning, our life together held a joy and amazement which was newborn every day. Beneath the joy, of course, was anguish and beneath the amazement was fear; but they did not work themselves to the beginning until our high beginning was aloes on our tongues. By then anguish and ear had become the surface on which we slipped and slid, losing balance, dignity, and pride.

David is an American in Paris: not rich, perhaps, but of the kind of class where it's typical to take the Grand Tour before returning to the States to begin a real life. He has a girlfriend, Hella, who's off in Spain thinking things over, leaving David to his friends, which consist mostly of older gay libertines. David himself once had an affair with a boy, but it left him so confused and ashamed he cut his then-friend from his life, and though he insists to men like Jacques and Guillaume that he is straight, a young bartender named Giovanni catches his eye, and their instant attraction puts the lie to all of David's claims. David begins a passionate affair with tempestuous Giovanni, even moving into his room, a dirty closet on the edge of Paris. The room becomes the novel's controlling symbol, a space of intense intimacy, beset by chaos, cut off from the world.

When Giovanni's Room begins, the affair has already ended, and David is waiting in the south of France to hear about Giovanni's execution by guillotine. Until the novel's end, we don't know what it is Giovanni has done to deserve this fate, but we understand it has something to do with David's ultimate rejection and abandonment of him. Of course, Giovanni's room is not the world, and David has a life, and a girlfriend, then fiancee, outside of it. But it's only in Giovanni's room that David can truly be real, that "real world" outside is really a falsehood, whether David is able to admit it to himself or not. Giovanni's Room is a novel about repression, and the power the social world has even over our most inner lives. Yes, David betrays Giovanni--but what world is possible where David does not? Jacques, David's older gay friend, and even sinister bar-owner Guillaume, give a glimpse of David's future, one in which he's not able to accept his sexuality until it's soured and curdled inside of him.

It took me a long time to get to Giovanni's Room. I read Go Tell It On the Mountain, which I didn't like: too abstract, too melodramatic, too internal. I thought, well, he must be one of those guys that's an amazing essayist who doesn't write fiction very well. So I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Giovanni's Room. Baldwin's long, stacked sentences bring out a lyric beauty in David's devastation, and the characters, Giovanni especially, are lively and vivid. There's a slightly antiquated quality to it that reminds me of an author I can't quite identify. At times I thought it was Fitzgerald, and at other times Forster--not even because of the gay-love-across-class-lines plot that resembles that of Forster's own doomed Maurice.

To have published a book like Giovanni's Room in 1956 seems like an act of suicide, or madness. Perhaps we've come some way since then. But it's hard not to wonder, in 2023, how many Davids are out there, how many Giovannis, gay or perhaps trans women and men, whose lives are contained in their little rooms because there's no place for them.