Another Country begins and ends in the alternative creative culture of jazz clubs, the low life and sexual permissiveness of late fifties New York. The first quarter of the book tells you about the life of a young black man Rufus in the last years of his life. All his friends love him deeply, but fear his temper and violent dark side. He is a brilliant jazz player and is undoubtedly a charismatic, but deeply troubled man. All his sexual affairs leave a broken and abused lover behind them. Rufus cannot help himself, he doesn't know why he behaves in cruel and self destructive ways towards the people he loves. His current lover Leona, a white woman, is besotted with him, but has to suffer repeated and increasingly more intense beatings and coersive behaviour. She loves Rufus and persists in the belief she can save him from himself. The dichotomy between that love and the constant betrayal of that love, gradually turns Leona mad, and she's incarcerated in an asylum. Rufus, blames himself and his inability to take control of his errant impulses. No one, apart from maybe his friend Vivaldo, is willing to help. In a moment of deep despair, Rufus kills himself as the only way he can see to resolve things.
And this individual tragic story sets the emotional background for what follows. Characters we simply were introduced to in the opening chapter now assume centre stage. Richard is a married with kids to Cass. He is an author whose career is on the rise to fame, but the relationship is foundering, they don't appear to like each other anymore. And not just because Cass doesn't believe Richard will ever be that good a writer. Vivaldo, is an aspiring writer and former friend of Rufus, who is in love with Ida. Rufus's sister. Ida is a tough fiercely independent woman with the beginnings of a career as a singer. All Vivaldo's previous relationships were in someway unsatisfying and this impacted on his ability to focus on developing his writing. His relationship with Ida is no different, plagued as it is by a jealousy and mistrust, that in the end proves to be well founded. Eric, who originally left to escape a brutally destructive affair with Rufus, returns to the New York from Paris after four years away, with his young black lover Yves due to follow soon. The remainder of the novel explores the promiscuous nature of these characters sexual explorations. The way they hurt and betray their lovers, and the fall outs, both major and minor, that result. Each person grasping for some elusive insights, to form a personal resolution for them.
Baldwin builds this dense world of intimacies, where black men love white women, white women love black men, hetrosexual women and men have affairs with bi-sexual men. The novel is full of bed hopping relationships, infidelity, unrealistic expectations, jealousy, envy, unmet desires, people trying to understand what it is they want, what they are looking for in a lover. And it all fluidly unfolds throughout the book. The novel shifts from one treacherously entangled relationship, teetering on the edge of shattering, to another. Some of the pages of dialogue exploring their feelings go on at long and often quite unproductively rambling length. And, if I'm, being honest, I don't know anyone who talks about their feelings and relationships in this way. I had to work really hard to stay with the story as it's focus kept shifting around so much, which I found unsettling as I was reading.
The view of inter-racial relationships that Baldwin presents us with here, is that white people have no idea what the life experience of black people is really like. There is inevitably a gap between lovers, a lack of comprehension of what it's like for a black person to be in a mixed race relationship. Despite the depth of the love, it feels an unequal one. But the inability to fully understand another person's experience and world view is not confined just to ones race, but also to different gender and to other sexual orientations, religions and ways of being. Other people are generally like another country to us, we love them, we befriend them, but can never fully understand anyone. We assume that we do know. But everyone senses when they've been seen and understood for who they truly are. This book really revolves, not around Rufus, but his close friend Vivaldo who is frequently the still point who all the characters return to, when in the midst of a chaos of their own making. Vivaldo, almost because of his own trials, tries not to judge, but just to love them the best he can.
CARROT REVIEW - 6/8
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