[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 will not affect the outcome.

What is conservative about both books is their emphasis on the need for roots, even though they be bitter roots, and poisonous. (p. 23)

Throughout the novel [the fate of the exile] is the leitmotif, on which countless variations are sung…. Trust and continuity among human beings, good and bad, are what even the poorest community affords its members; that is what makes it a community, Another Country is not about a community; it is about a peer-group, all of whose members are trying to "make it." Their worst fear is that they may get "hung up" on one another. They have beds, though not for sleeping; but they have no homes. This, in contemporary fiction, is no novelty. What gives such stature to Baldwin's work and makes his characters tragic and comic is that—unlike say, [Jack] Kerouac's or [Gerald] Durrell's—they have choices….

Baldwin is the least sentimental of novelists; and his characters' struggle to "make it" is never just status-seeking; it is an effort to confront and dominate the crushing reality of poverty and anonymity in New York, and to acquire the minimum essentials of decency and identity. Sometimes what they become in the process destroys them; but—and here Mr. Baldwin is unusual among his contemporaries—very often it doesn't. The result is a magnificent moral cliffhanger. (p. 24)