A few years ago, a writing friend of mine shared that there was a book from her childhood she loved so much that for years, she carried it with her everywhere she went. I loved the sentiment, but in reality, I didn’t have a similar book. I had favorites, like Les Misérables (about which I wrote my thesis) or even Bloomability (which stood like a testament to my childhood I could dive back into any time I wanted), but there was no book I loved so much I physically couldn’t bear the thought of being away from it.
Then I read Giovanni’s Room.
This book is everything that Hemingway was for me before I realized how one-dimensional his vision of the world was; how much the internalized misogyny I experienced in my obsession with the Lost Generation led me to despise the female characters in his work for all the wrong reasons.
Baldwin’s romanticized Paris is much like Hemingway’s: a city where one can sit for a few moments at a 6th arrondissement café and be sure of running into someone one knows; a city where nights out end at dawn in a café with a charmingly surly matron serving platters of chilled oysters and bottles of cold white wine. But it is nevertheless also a city with a grubby, malicious edge: a city where gay men are oppressed and hated. It is through the eyes of a self-awarely dishonest narrator, David, that the reader discovers this Paris and a narrative that is, at its core, a story of shame.
The central narrative tension of this book may be internal, but unlike other navel gazing books from the same period, Giovanni’s Room surrounds our narrator with a panoply of three-dimensional characters, each of which would merit his or her own story. They are a chorus helping David, who is dishonest with no one more than himself, lead the reader through the devastating realization of sexuality in a world without options.
The love story upon which the title is based is barely given any space on the page: we are given, instead, tidbits of the narrator’s attempts to reject his attraction; the repercussions of his failings. The titular Room is a metonym that adds even more of the distance the narrator so craves, when he realizes that, in order to flee Giovanni – and everything he represents – he doesn’t just need to flee Giovanni’s titular chambre de bonne, or even its neighborhood of Nation, but the whole of the city of Paris. The story becomes one that circles around the love affair without ever really zeroing in on it, and the heartbreak, inevitable from the first page, is all the more wrenching because the love was never fully lived to begin with.