"He who is filthy, let him be filthy still."
GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN
James Baldwin
It struck me as a small surprise that this was Baldwin's most famous novel, me having come of age in a world where an increasing amount of my age group could publicly relate to the travails of the characters in Giovanni's Room, as well as having already read Baldwin's larger (and maybe more successful) effort and having acquainted myself with no small amount of his non-fiction efforts. But in this book, one sees many of the precursors for what would become Baldwin's later thematic concerns as well as the grandness that is to flavor the worldview captured in his writings.
I struggle to consider this novel on its own merits, because I'm always seeing it in comparison to some other work, more so than usual. As far as sentence-level prose, this book is a more elaborate treatment of race than is found in his sharp, pinpoint-focused essays. As a treatise on faith, I find it a sharper, less kind treatment than in Marilynne Robinson's Pulitzer Prize-winning slice of a book. Here, we see not only the sustaining power of faith but also its ugliness when it is worn by and acted out through hypocritical vessels. A man who preaches for a profession but disavows his bastard child, conceived in a moment of "weakness." Otherwise viciously secular characters brought to the altar in a moment of thunderstruck humility after having borne a thousand lashes from a past life. What is it to be black in 1930s America and believe in God? In Scripture? Ultimately, it is an existence lived in paradox, and by the end of this, I didn't know whether to congratulate or chastise the characters on where they had arrived, after having gobbled up the entirety of their lives as imagined on those pages. All I knew was that I was witnessing incredible humanity: glowing, disgusting, charred, luminescent, muddy, incandescent humanity. In a prose by turns baroque and by turns Biblical.
As an attempt by the author to figure out his father, a man perhaps governed by impulses he himself did not or could not understand, I find I like and appreciate this one more than I do David Milch's poetic and opaque Luck.
I will say, described herein is probably the most intense church service I've yet witnessed on paper.
I'm eager to round out the trilogy with Giovanni's Room. And cannot recommend this book highly enough.
James Baldwin
It struck me as a small surprise that this was Baldwin's most famous novel, me having come of age in a world where an increasing amount of my age group could publicly relate to the travails of the characters in Giovanni's Room, as well as having already read Baldwin's larger (and maybe more successful) effort and having acquainted myself with no small amount of his non-fiction efforts. But in this book, one sees many of the precursors for what would become Baldwin's later thematic concerns as well as the grandness that is to flavor the worldview captured in his writings.
I struggle to consider this novel on its own merits, because I'm always seeing it in comparison to some other work, more so than usual. As far as sentence-level prose, this book is a more elaborate treatment of race than is found in his sharp, pinpoint-focused essays. As a treatise on faith, I find it a sharper, less kind treatment than in Marilynne Robinson's Pulitzer Prize-winning slice of a book. Here, we see not only the sustaining power of faith but also its ugliness when it is worn by and acted out through hypocritical vessels. A man who preaches for a profession but disavows his bastard child, conceived in a moment of "weakness." Otherwise viciously secular characters brought to the altar in a moment of thunderstruck humility after having borne a thousand lashes from a past life. What is it to be black in 1930s America and believe in God? In Scripture? Ultimately, it is an existence lived in paradox, and by the end of this, I didn't know whether to congratulate or chastise the characters on where they had arrived, after having gobbled up the entirety of their lives as imagined on those pages. All I knew was that I was witnessing incredible humanity: glowing, disgusting, charred, luminescent, muddy, incandescent humanity. In a prose by turns baroque and by turns Biblical.
As an attempt by the author to figure out his father, a man perhaps governed by impulses he himself did not or could not understand, I find I like and appreciate this one more than I do David Milch's poetic and opaque Luck.
I will say, described herein is probably the most intense church service I've yet witnessed on paper.
I'm eager to round out the trilogy with Giovanni's Room. And cannot recommend this book highly enough.