Baldwin, James (Vol. 17) - Edgar Z. Friedenberg

EDGAR Z. FRIEDENBERG

[When] I finished [Another Country], I felt as if I had become one of the minor characters in it, though less real and utterly outclassed sexually.

Even this is no threat. One cannot get lost in Baldwin's work because it is completely contiguous with reality; an extension of it in depth rather than a substitute for it. There is no sense of transition, merely of immensely heightened awareness and vividness and moral understanding….

Another Country is, in its implications, in some ways a profoundly conservative novel. In this respect, it resembles The Last of the Just, though I am less certain that the inferences one draws from that work are what [André] Schwarz-Bart intends. With Baldwin I am sure; his level of technical competence is so high that a reader has roughly as much choice about how to respond as he would to a skillful executioner. He may, to be sure, misunderstand what is happening to him, but this...

[The entire page is 456 words long]

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