Composed mostly in flashback, [Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone] follows Proudhammer through a bitter Harlem childhood, the birth of ambition toward the stage, a long love affair with a white actress, a homosexual love alongside that, the beginning of political awareness, a step toward identification with his people's new militancy.

A half-dozen themes, none of which is realized, none brought to any conclusion in the imagination, they exist almost as mutually exclusive, as though in setting out to do a big, complex, invented life Baldwin had been unable to find a principle of coherence for its parts…. [What] is missing is any sense of artistic inevitability, any conviction that things have to be this way and no other, that one scene prepares the next, one image its successor, one emphasis of language its corollary or alternative….

His chief problem is that he cannot find a rhetoric that isn't dictated by what is expected, in literature, from the particular theme, or fictional situation, or drama. Thus, in writing about his hero's childhood and wishing to establish the gulf between the boy's father's pride and his sons' knowledge of his abjection, he falls into an overblown prose…. When he wants to be grave and philosophical about his hero's deepest human connections, he writes sententiously and obviously…. (p. 28)

The point about such writing is that it isn't incidental, a matter of some sort of inexact or flawed surface beneath which the true, commendable fiction shapes itself; nothing reveals itself in fiction except through the language, its details and its structure, and what reveals itself here is an earnest, literary desire, a novel being made from an idea of fiction, or rather from an ill-assorted series of such ideas. (p. 29)