There are many possible "other countries" throughout James Baldwin's novel, set in New York in the early 1960s (when it was written). There are actual other countries -- two characters are in Greece when we meet them, and one of them is French -- but more salient are the separate worlds, packed densely into that most remarkable, most wonderful and terrible city in the US: New York. The characters living in bohemian squalor in the Village are a world away from those struggling to get by uptown in Harlem (a few blocks from where I sit, writing this. Only in the end does it seem that the other country of the title is actually *love.*
This is a searing novel, occasionally melodramatic, yes, but on the whole, gutting, blistering. The characters are all trying so hard, trying desperately to defy what they have learned about cultures, groups, genders, races, sexualities. 'White' and 'Black,' 'gay' and 'straight,' married and single, the interwoven characters are all cheating , lying, and clinging to those they need, all while constantly driving knives into those who most want to help them.
In one brief moment of successful -- albeit stolen, fleeting, and doubly adulterous -- passion, one character turns to another to say:
This day is almost over. How long will it be before such a day comes for us again? … I can't really like from moment to moment, day to day, month to month, make you less lonely. Or you, me. We aren't driven in the same directions and I can't help that, any more that you can. … And if we tried to arrange it, prolong it, control it, if we tried to take more than what we've -- by some miracle, some miracle, I swear -- stumbled on, then I'd just become a parasite and we'd both shrivel.
This, it seems, is as good as can be hoped for: an hour of true companionship, before everything spirals away again, out of control, to the wild Jazz beats that punctuate their lives.
