James Baldwin's screenplay adaptation of [The Autobiography of Malcolm X, written with Alex Haley] now published as One Day When I Was Lost, is no substitute for the original. Unfortunately, it is not much worth reading at all, except for those who have a special interest in Baldwin's career and its curious downward spiral during the last years. What ever has happened to him, anyway? He seems to have become increasingly isolated from America and its problems, perhaps even from himself, during the 1960s. This screenplay, about which there was a lot of talk just a few years ago, may have been a last major effort on his part to come to terms with something important in his own life. Perhaps on this level Baldwin has succeded—or else why let us see it at all? He certainly has not written a produceable script. It is, first of all, about twice as long and three times as talky as any movie would dare be today. Secondly—and more important—it carries no sense of story with it at all. It would, I think, be utterly incomprehensible to one who had not read the Haley book. All in all, it was probably unwise of Baldwin to publish One Day When I Was Lost, for it adds nothing to Malcolm and can only detract from its author's reputation.

[If Beale Street Could Talk], while at no point inhabiting the same universe as [Erich Segal's] Love Story, effortlessly rebalances the ledger on the side of truthfulness without ever needing to acknowledge the lies and treasons of previous clerks….

[The] book might sound like another angry and embittered novel about Harlem which, if lacking overt violence, has to do with the violence done to men's souls. That would be an unfair simplification, even though it is a very properly angry book and even though Mr Baldwin just occasionally allows a note of sententiousness or sentimentality to sound. Nor is the book a heart-warming vignette of an embattled ethnic minority who have a monopoly of very wonderful human values, even if it is perhaps laying it on a bit thick to have Fonny discover himself as a sculptor rather than as, say, an urban guerrilla. Among other things, it is an often beautiful and moving description of a game played with loaded dice, in which there is no option but to play and no outcome but to lose. And just as it took a regressive fantasist to shed a tear over Love Story, so it will take one to remain unaffected by If Beale Street Could Talk.

All the terrible things that happen to the people in this very disappointing book [If Beale Street Could Talk] are entirely credible, but little else about it is…. [The feebleness of the efforts of Tish's family and Fonny's father to help Fonny] says a great deal about what it means to be poor, black, and vulnerable. The moral strength of the book is tremendously undercut, however, by the fact that all Mr. Bladwin's characters are either angels or devils; by the pomposity of much of his language; and by the embarrassing gooiness of Tish and Fonny's romance…. From time to time, behind Tish's innocent bleatings one hears a somewhat discordant voice. It sounds tired, bitter, cynical, blunt, worldly, and infinitely more authentic in tone than anything else in the narrative. It sounds like the author's true voice, and its strength makes one regret not hearing it more often. (pp. 79-80)