[In] Another Country, there are no effective controls—of form, of language, of moral content, of theme…. [Metaphorically, the "country" of the title] is that misty region on the nether side of society where alienated men and women act out the racial and sexual—and, improbably, the international, or at least the Franco-American—encounter. The characters—black and white, beat and square, irresolutely straight and avowedly homosexual—are in their variety meant to describe the topography of that other country, and to dramatize the way life is lived there….

Baldwin loses control almost immediately, and never recovers it; and the manner in which he fails lies at the heart of the novel's totally disabling flaws. With catastrophically absurd and chaotic results for the work as fiction, and as criticism of life, he takes his metaphors, his allegory, literally: not illuminating in some imaginative and contingent sense, but equivalent in an exact and mathematical one, so that the torments of race and sex, each mirroring the other, are fought out on the same battleground, with the same weapons, to the same issue….

[Because] he misnames the acts and feelings which are the essence of his novel, Baldwin compounds confusion, adding moral to aesthetic failure. We watch it happening on every page. The point of view shifts erratically; the tempo flags; scenes lose their force and drift into limbo; dialogue is wooden, listless, frequently superfluous. The language, because it is without its own energy and shape, seeks desperately for vitality and meaning in obscenity; and because the characters, uncreated, do not relate one to the other, Baldwin drives them furiously to the performance of their agonized acts, stridently demanding of them a significance and beauty they cannot give. (p. 15)