Contemporary Literary Criticism | Baldwin, James (Vol. 17) - William Esty

WILLIAM ESTY

Giovanni's Room is the best American novel dealing with homosexuality I have read….

[From a recounting of the plot, Giovanni's Room] sounds like a painful novel, which it certainly is. It also sounds like a meretriciously fashionable-sensational one, which it is not…. He successfully avoids the cliché literary attitudes: overemphasis on the grotesque, and the use of homosexuality as a facile symbol for the estrangement which makes possible otherwise unavailable insights into the workings of "normal" society and "normal" people; in short, the Homosexual as Artist.

Not that Giovanni's Room is without faults. The novel's ending … is somewhat lame, his descriptions of the hero's emotions run too heavily to beating hearts, trembling, bright lights, overwhelming stirrings, falling, drowning, the bottom of the sea. Also, Baldwin's blond-athlete-type hero, like Norman Mailer's in The Deer Park, never wholly...

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