What kind of life can we have in this room?

Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin

Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary
Giovanni's Room is a story of love won and love lost, identities seen and unseen, societal pressure to conform, and what happens when people are pushed to their limits. The story is told by David, who recounts a kind of epic, but ephemeral love story starring himself and another man, Giovanni. From the start of the work we know Giovanni is doomed to die; but only close to the end is it that we discover why. We flash forwards and backwards in time with David, defining his character moment by moment. Each memory or experience brings us closer to understanding of the reason for Giovanni's fate (and in my case, a little closer to despising David). It is a nuanced story that is propelled forward by its visual beauty, rather than by dramatic actions or outcomes. That is not to say that it doesn't have its moments of surprise, or that it is wholly without plot, but rather that the novel's breaths are composed of exquisite tableaus. While the reader is curious to discover what transpired to lead Giovanni to the guillotine, she is equally happy to bask in each painting and explore each intricate detail along the way. 
Spoiler Over: Continue Here

If you would like to know more specifically what happened in the book, you shall simply have to read it for yourself. I have to say, it is one of my new favorites, and I highly recommend it. It's also quite short, so you could enjoy it in a long afternoon, or a long weekend, depending on your desired reading pace. This blob is a longer one, since, as you know, I tend to blob more when I like a book.

In speaking to a dear friend (and kindred spirit) about this book, I told her that it was one of my new favorites, but also that I deeply disliked the main character and found somethings about Giovanni deeply problematic from a feminist perspective. I also said I wasn't terribly involved in the plot. After which she said, "so what was it that you liked about it to make it a favorite?" ;)

To me, that is the beauty of great writing, and constructing a beautiful novel. While I can name books that I adore because they make me infinitely happy and I feel deep kinship with the wonderful characters, I also have favorites where I downright despise the protagonist, and don't particularly enjoy the book's outcome. Great Expectations has long been an all-time favorite, and I have never liked Pip. Or Estella. Or most of what happens. I also dislike most of Hemingway's protagonists, but greatly enjoy his works. 

Anyway, I guess what I'm trying to say is that I like that books can still surprise me. Now, allow me to present the novel to you via a series of nouns, both proper and common. I have alphabetized them for you (no, no, you needn't thank me. It was nothing.)

America, from sea to shining sea
Baldwin wrote this work while he was living in France for several years, and his narrator's relationship with his American identity was very complex:

• America’s history, her aspirations, her peculiar triumphs, her even more peculiar defeats, and her position in the world . . . are all so profoundly and stubbornly unique that the very word “America” remains a new, almost completely undefined and extremely controversial proper noun. No one in the world seems to know exactly what it describes, not even we motley millions who call ourselves Americans.

David (no last name); aka, our narrator
David struggles with himself in a variety of ways. He was not wholly unlikable, but I certainly did not see what drew Giovanni to him. Here are a few quotes that I think sum up David well. 

• ...for the vision I gave my father of my life was exactly the vision in which I myself most desperately needed to believe.

• Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced. I think now that if I had had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home. I love this passage. I think it's my favorite one in the book. I also love the 'nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced.' Lollllz. 

• And no matter what I was doing, another me sat in my belly, absolutely cold with terror over the question of my life. This existential internal terror was certainly reflective of David's own struggles, but it was also SOOOO delightfully French. 

• But perhaps she sensed, from time to time, that my clutch was too insistent to be trusted, certainly too insistent to last. David grabs onto things, and onto people (did I mention that he has a girlfriend/would-be wife for most of the book? Her name is Hella. Like, wow David, that's HELLA uncool of you to be having multiple people on the side) but he is deeply unreliable in the end. 

Giovanni, of titular fame
Perhaps this is exactly what Baldwin wanted, but as much as I hated David, I loved Giovanni. He was tender and sweet and funny and vulnerable in all the ways that David was closed off from the world and mean and cold. I wanted to reach through the page and hug Giovanni, and celebrate his capacity for joy. 

• So I saw that he could be useful if I could only find some way to make him keep his hands off me.... he has more hands than an octopus and no dignity whatsoever. Giovanni, in reference to his employer, who has a lecherous nature. I loved the 'more hands than an octopus' line. 

• 'To choose!' cried Giovanni, turning his face away from me and speaking, it appeared, to an invisible ally who had been eavesdropping on this conversation all along. 

• He belonged to this strange city, which did not belong to me. referencing Paris

• 'Come. I am sure that I am much prettier than your wallpaper - or your concierge. I will smile at you when you wake up. They will not.' adorable Giovanni, on convincing David to stay.

• ''If I am not here,' said Giovanni, both vindictive and near tears, 'by the time you come back again, I will be at home. You remember what that is - ? It is near a zoo.' When David leaves Giovanni to return to Hella, he doesn't even bother to say goodbye, he just disappears. Giovanni happens to run into him and they have this dramatic exchange. I love how Giovanni shames David, but also the melodramatic quality of his response. It reminded me of The Birdcage, when Nathan Lane's character ominously decides to head off to the local cemetery with nothing but his toothbrush.

• 'You want to leave Giovanni because he makes you stink. You want to despise Giovanni because he is not afraid of the stink of love.' Giovanni, for all his problematic opinions on women (he likes to beat a good woman, need I say more?) is unapologetic in his love for David, and he is not afraid to admit both the intensity of his feelings and the fact that he feels them for a man. The counterpoint of David and Giovanni is so striking and stunning.

Guillotine, and it's not-so-distant past
So you may have noticed that I'm revealing some plot details here, even though my 'spoiler' is over. #sorrynotsorry #getoverit

The book starts off with a mention of Giovanni being headed to the guillotine in the morning, and for some time, you wonder (or at least I did, as a reader) if he is being punished for being gay, or if he has committed some offense. It's the 1950's in France, so it's a little unclear where the legal world stands on gayness, and Baldwin waits until much later to divulge that Giovanni has murdered his lecherous boss, and the sentence is, in fact, for this murder. 

In case you were wondering like I was if the guillotine was really used as late as the 1950's, get this. The last person to be guillotined in France was in 1977. I won't share the details of his crime, as they're quite dark, but needless to say, I was surprised it was so late!

La langue française
Since the novel takes place in Paris, there's understandably quite a bit of French in it. As I think it was more standard at the time that the learned reader would know French, there's no translation, and sometimes it's explained contextually, but other times not. I found this pleasant and natural, given the locale of the book, but I could see this being exceedingly frustrating for a non-French-speaking reader.

Tutoyering
If you're not familiar with French, it has a formal 'you' and an informal 'you', much like many other languages. When you use the informal 'you' - tu - it's called tutoyering. When you use the more formal 'you' - vous - it's called vousvoyering. When, and if, you ever move from vousvoyering to tutoyering with various acquaintances/friends/family is deeply complex, and open to much discussion. 

I particularly enjoyed this moment, in part because it felt extremely on brand for David and his cold nature. He decides at one point to call up a woman he had met before, hit on her, and get her to sleep with him. He does this for a variety of reasons, none of them particularly honorable, but all understandable. After they sleep together, they have a toast, and this exchange takes place:

'"A la votre,' I said.
'A la votre?' She giggled. 'A la tienne, cheri!"

Essentially, he's still using the formal 'you', even though they have just been quite intimate with each other, and she slips over to the informal 'tu', calling him dear, and poking fun at his stiffness. I snorted at this line in the book and thought, David would vousvoyer a woman after having sex with her. 

Whiteness
One of the most striking things about this book is that the protagonist is white, something he makes clear from the very first page: 

"My face is like a face you have seen many times. My ancestors conquered a continent, pushing pushing across death-laden plains, until they came to an ocean which faced away from Europe into a darker past."

Given what a presence James Baldwin has now, it was jarring for me at first to place his racial identity to the side. But, as I came to suspect as the book went on, the duality of Baldwin's identity was (and in many ways, unfortunately still is) too heavy, too profound, to tackle at the same time. Here's a quote from him on it:

‘‘I certainly could not possibly have—not at that point in my life—handled the other great weight, the ‘Negro problem.’ The sexual-moral light was a hard thing to deal with. I could not handle both propositions in the same book. There was no room for it.’’

Women, and some problematic opinions of them

• I suppose this was why I asked her to marry me: to give myself something to be moored to... But people can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. David, on proposing to Hella, a relationship which ends up going down the drain

• These absurd women running around today, full of ideas and nonsense, and thinking themselves equal to men - quelle rigolade! - they need to be beaten half to death so that they can find out who rules the world. and Giovanni, in aforementioned problematic comment re: beating women

Writing
I really came to feel by the end of this book that there was such a thing as a Baldwin sentence, in the same way as there exists a Hemingway sentence, a Proustian sentence, a Woolf sentence. Here's a sample: 

"He was one of those people who, quick to laugh, are slow to anger; so that their anger, when it comes, is all the more impressive, seeming to leap from some unsuspected crevice like a fire which will bring the whole house down." on David's father

Referents/reverberations
There were many books that came to mind as I read Giovanni's Room, several of which aligned immediately when it became clear that Giovanni had been sentenced to death. This is a rich topic for fiction, it seems. Here are the novels I have read for this blob that have a similar thread, in chronological order of publication: 

• A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens (1859)

• The Trial, Franz Kafka (1925) 

• Native Son, Richard Wright (1940)

• L'Ètranger, Albert Camus (1942)

• Giovanni's Room, James Baldwin (1956)

• To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee (1960)

• A Lesson Before Dying, Ernest Gaines (1993)

Hemingway vibe
"You feel, in Paris, all the time gone by." I loved this line, comparing Paris to New York, and how in Paris, the history is palpable in every direction. A lot of the way that David interacted with France as a sort of would-be expat reminded me of Hemingway's characters. 

L'Etranger
If you know me, you know I have a tenuous relationship with this Camus work. That being said, tell me that this line from Giovanni's Room (about David, of course): 

• Something had broken in me to make me so cold and so perfectly still and far away.

Doesn't remind you of this guy: 

• “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can't be sure.” oh, Meursault. 

Proust

I have to say I really liked that lots of this book reminded me of Proust. As you know, I'm an unapologetic Proust lover. This adorable exchange between Giovanni and David, on their first meeting: 

But you will come more often now? 

Ah!' cried Giovanni. 'Don't you know when you have made a friend?'
I knew I must look foolish and that my question was foolish too: 'So soon?" 

"Why no,' he said reasonably, and looked at his watch, 'we can wait another hour if you like. We can become friends then. Or we can wait until closing time. We can become friends then. Or we can wait until tomorrow, only that means that you must come in here tomorrow and perhaps you have something else to do."

Reminded me of one of my favorite Proust scenes, between the Young Boy Narrator (YBN) and Gilberte, his beloved little friend, when she arrives extremely late to the Champs-Élysées where they play together: 

"'I had so many things to ask you,' I said to her. 'I thought that today was going to mean so much in our friendship. And no sooner have you come than you go away! Try to come early tomorrow, so that I can talk to you.'"

Title possibilities
I often keep a running list of potential titles for my blog post, and I was amused to see that this book's selections actually tell the whole story in beautiful succinctness. 

• People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.

• The power and the promise and the mystery of that body made me suddenly afraid.

• I had decided to allow no room in the universe for something which shamed and frightened me. 

• The world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget.

• We have not committed any crime.

• Why have you gone away from me?

• What kind of life can we have in this room? 

• But I'm a man, a man! What do you think can happen between us?

A few new words I picked up

dipsomaniac -  a drunkard or alcoholic: someone who drinks alcohol to excess.

vituperative - bitter and abusive

Some lovely Baldwin sentences

• And Guillaume brightened suddenly - he was really remarkable, as though he carried, hidden somewhere on his person, a needle filled with vitamins, which, automatically, at the blackening hour, discharged itself into his veins.

• Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.

• I stared at absurd Paris, which was as cluttered now, under the scalding sun, as the landscape of my heart.

• The Americans have no sense of doom, none whatever. They do not recognize doom when they see it.

I'll leave you with this rather desperate line from Giovanni, to David: 

"I have never reached you. You have never really been here. All day, while I worked, to make this room for you."

Be off to your Friday night pursuits, spend crucial hours and days with your close friends, and whatever you do, don't be like David. Let people reach you. And if society has a version of your identity it wants you to wear, blow it off and design your own damn self. Life's too short to be anyone else.

Maybe once you could play basketball but you can't do anything now.

Rabbit, Run by John Updike

Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary
Erstwhile local basketball star Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom starts this winner of a novel (oh sorry, am I editorializing already?) off by driving away from his life, his wife, his toddler son, and their baby on the way. He leaves ostensibly because his wife is an alcoholic and he feels trapped in their life. He returns for reasons which are not entirely clear and crashes with an old basketball coach, and then a new ladyfriend/mistress. One of the town's clergy tries to 'rehabilitate' Rabbit's marriage, and Rabbit himself, and when the baby is born, Janice (Rabbit's wife) takes him back with little battle.

Rabbit sticks around for a hot minute, but starts itching to leave again almost immediately. While Rabbit is out, trying to see his old mistress Ruth, Janice goes on a bender and accidentally drowns their new baby in the bathtub. (I know. Not nice!) Rabbit acts like a jerk and blames Janice alone for the incident, eventually heading back to Ruth and trying to convince her to keep THEIR unborn child which he finds out is also on the way. Ruth tells him she will consider keeping the child IF he divorces his wife. Rabbit is overwhelmed at first, but then says he'll do it.

Aaaaand, then he runs away. Again.
Spoiler Over: Continue Here

Well folks, I hated this book. And if you knew my grandmother and how she really felt it wasn't appropriate to use the word 'hate' unless you really really meant it, you'll know how seriously I mean it when I say it. I disliked it so much that I didn't even want to blob on it. And that's saying something. Because sometimes I at least enjoy a good rage-blob now and again. ;)

Here are some of the notes I took in my copy of this book, largely about Rabbit, but let's be honest, he couldn't be so convincing as a character if there wasn't a little of that in Updike, too: 

- Misogynist
- Sexist
- Sexual assaulter/borderline sexual predator
- Puts women in uncomfortable situations, both on an emotional and a physical level
- Wants all women, but his sister should be a saint and never interact with men.
- All women are sexual objects (except his sister. See note above.)
- Once women have children or become caretakers for their husbands, they become unsexy.

I also took a running tally of how often I wrote expressions of disgust on the text itself as I read, much like when I tallied Holden's references to being depressed in 'The Catcher in the Rye' (37.) Here's the tally from this book:

EW - 1
BARF - 8
UGH - 18
Inappropriate expletive - 2

Here are three moments that I think perfectly sum up everything I hated about Rabbit: 

(1) Rabbit: "There's something about her. She's a menace."
Ruth: "This poor wife you left? You're the menace, I'd say." Even his new mistress can tell he's the problem. I mean, why do you think Janice drinks in the first place, Rabbit? Ever think of that, huh didja didja?

(2) Ruth: "You're so smug, is what gets me. Don't you ever think you're going to have to pay a price?"
Rabbit: "If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price." Yes, perfect, Rabbit. You ruin everything and then someone else will clean up your mess. GREAT attitude.

(3) "That his touch still lives in his hands elates him." This is a reference to Rabbit's former amazing record in basketball locally. This whole book felt like a treatise on why you should encourage athletes to pursue multiple interests so they don't spend their whole adult life feeling inadequate and lusting after their glory days.

Well, I believe it was Don Quixote who said that "There's no book so bad that it does not have something good in it."In that vein, here are three lines I actually liked: 

• He's safe inside his own skin, he doesn't want to come out.

• That 'her' is a forked word now startles him. After Rabbit learns his child with Ruth is a girl.

• Nelson (Rabbit's son, FYI) is having soup and raw carrots and a Lebanon baloney sandwich by himself at the table. LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL. Obviously I had to give a shout out to the Lebanon bologna reference (THOUGH IT'S BOLOGNA, NOT BALONEY, UPDIKE). I believe the only other Lebanon, PA, reference I've come across in all these works is a bizarre mention of it in 'The Red-Headed League', a Sherlock Holmes mystery. Gotta give Lebanon its props when it gets its (infrequent) moment in the spotlight!

Well folks, that's all I've got. I'll be hobbling off to the gym with my almost-healed sprained ankle for some low-key stationary biking, and I've already finished 'Giovanni's Room', so expect a blob on that soon. Read away! Keep each other safe. Keep faith. Good night.