Giovanni's Room

Somewhere in Giovanni's Room, there is a great story. But it falls short of having an emotional effect due to the pacing being constrained by its length, not allowing for the main relationship to have much weight to it.

It doesn't feel rushed, but more unearned in how the two fall in love with each other; it is a product of lust rather than something born out of intimacy and connection due to their social isolation. None of the characters are as fleshed out as they should be. Giovanni doesn't have much character to him for much of the book, falling into the unfortunate archetype of the manic pixie dream boy who lacks any depth until the last third of the book. David's character is only interesting when he's not with Giovanni, where he struggles with the shame he feels for loving another man and the impending doom he bears with his fiancee coming to visit. But there is not much of a connection between these two - the plot almost mandates they fall in love too quickly and skims over much of the crucial aspects of how that came to be.

The pacing is the problem with the book. It is much too short to give the depth that is needed for any of these relationships to flourish. The emotional beats are there, and if the previous chapters didn't suffer from the issues it had, it would have been effective. It would have been devastating. I felt cold for not feeling much during these brutally emotional moments of cowardice and despair, but I could exactly pinpoint why. This goes to show how great Baldwin is at his craft - his prose his excellent, with every sentence so dense with information but with the craft of a poem. He can take some of the most mundane moments of everyday life and make them full of meaning. The first chapter especially - which prepared me to expect a novel that would become one of my all time favorites - manages to weave in so much about David's life. The way sex was written didn't remind me of smutty literature, but instead something that was a beautiful augmentation of love; how it is awkward, but the connection between the two could be felt that it was inevitable. The act itself was described in a way that didn't glorify the details, but the emotions involved.I was almost in tears by the end. I understood where David came from, his guilt about loving a man and disappointing his father by telling him. It was heartbreaking, but unfortunately the book does not keep the emotional momentum it had in the first chapter.

I can appreciate Baldwin's craft - but I cannot find myself enjoying it. I can appreciate the fact that he made same-sex love a universal story, where the focus isn't on hiding, but on embracing the human aspect of love, but I wanted more. I didn't get enough of the relationship to really feel the impact it wanted to have, and behind Baldwin's beautiful prose and raw emotion, was a story that was simply too short on the intimate details.