Another Country by James Baldwin

"The silence of the listeners became strict with abruptly focused attention, cigarettes were unlit, and drinks stayed on the tables; and in all of the faces, even the most ruined and most dull, a curious, wary light appeared. They were being assaulted by the saxophonist who perhaps no longer wanted their love and merely hurled his outrage at them with the same contemptuous, pagan pride with which he humped the air. And yet the question was terrible and real; the boy was blowing with his lungs and guts out of his own short past; somewhere in that past, in the gutters or gang fights or gang shags; in the acrid room, on the sperm-stiffened blanket, behind marijuana or the needle, under the smell of piss in the precinct basement, he had received the blow from which he never would recover and this no one wanted to believe. Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me?"

The title of Baldwin's book unintentionally captures what it is like to read it in 2011, so many decades after its first publication. Set in the years following World War II, the New York presented here feels like another universe. It is a place where a black man lives in fear of the cop on the corner, making every street a terrifying gauntlet. Mixed-race couples are confronted with scorn and revulsion in the faces they pass in Washington Square Park. A corned beef sandwich and a beer can buy you a young homeless man for the night, if you're lonely. After last call, in the city's shadowy spaces, patrons from the gay bar and the longshoreman bar meet in violent embrace, even though they would never acknowledge each other in the harsh light of day. Young couples live in cramped apartments, nothing more than cages where they claw at each other. Aging bohemians haunt the same haunts of their youth, clinging to the same stale dreams, and endlessly repeating the same stale ideas on how to live.

Above all it is a place where everyone, everywhere, is searching for love. And yet they hate themselves so much that all they can do is unleash their hate on those closest to them. This self-hate, which perpetuates a destructive Oresteia-like cycle, stems from the mere fact that they're black, or gay, or white even, a reminder that racism and prejudice poison both the oppressed and the oppressor.

Of course, some of these aspects of New York life are eternal; others, particularly those concerning the lives of blacks, I'm not in a position to say, and the news gives reasons for equal measures of optimism and pessimism. It would be comforting to think that things have changed, that we hate ourselves less, or at least for reasons that are less arbitrary. Yet Baldwin's vision of New York is so convincingly miserable, and at times so depressingly familiar, that I often wondered what I was doing here myself.

Another Country, as you can probably tell, is a brutal book, and brutally told, with the blunt force of the saxophonist described above, thrusting all his rage, all that is terrible and real, on an awestruck and uncomfortable audience. I suppose the question is whether that brutality serves some purpose in the end, whether in some twisted way such trials make for a better person, or a better nation as a whole. Perhaps by recounting the effects of society's sins, Baldwin is suggesting that some sacrifice has been made by his suffering characters, offering those who survive a chance to redeem all of history. It is an open-ended question whether redemption is possible for the characters in the book, who only rarely, if ever, rise above the maelstrom of their time and see a way to move forward. More worryingly, it remains an open-ended question for the contemporary reader too.