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 emerges from dimness.

Nevertheless, these shortcomings only slightly detract from the book's impact. If David, the American, remains even more lumpish than he is supposed to be, Giovanni, the experienced European more vulnerable than a child, is beautifully and economically realized. Baldwin insists on the painful, baffling complexity of things….

The Europe-versus-America theme is basic to Giovanni's Room. The Europeans' epigrammatic summations of individual and national character are contrasted with the gracelessness, sometimes oafishness of the Americans, David and his father, vacuously mouthing their hand-me-down colloquialisms.

But the Europeans are helpless, their knowledge is largely the knowledge of their own helplessness and that of others. They perceive some home truths about the American, but they misunderstand much, too…. In the end, neither Europe nor America is "right."

The complexities are of course most numerous in the treatment of the relationship between David and Giovanni…. Like so many heterosexual lovers also, David and Giovanni must fail each other because each seeks to become strong through the imagined strength of the other.