i'm a very very complex person

On Sunday, I finished reading my book club's most recent selection, Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin. What a powerfully written book! Every sentence rings with passion and anger. I loved the writing. Baldwin has a tremendous sense of rhythm; that, coupled with his nearly biblical diction, lends tremendous force to his story. I can hardly believe that Baldwin was only 27 when he wrote this. The book is so self-assured, so confident in its own power and seemingly so unconcerned with audience that it seems like it should have been written by an author much more established in his career. At the same time, much of the story comes straight from Baldwin’s own experience, and in that the book seems like the soul cry of a very young man, a man who must burn a path through his history before he can move forward. Baldwin himself said that, “Go Tell It on the Mountain is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else,” and reading it I can see the truth in that statement.

Go Tell It on the Mountain was a book that I admired rather than enjoyed. I could appreciate John’s tremendous struggle with religious belief, but I could never truly feel the anguish it caused him. The part of the book that I liked best was the middle section, “The Prayers of the Saints,” in which the stories of John’s mother, father, and aunt are told. I love the way, halfway through the book, Baldwin uses this section to reveal the secrets that everyone has been carrying: their old hurts, their undisclosed guilt, the wrongs they’ve done or think they’ve done, the things they’ll never speak of to each other or to John. I also found these stories remarkable because, after hearing so much about the great faith and religious conviction of these characters, we suddenly see the extent to which each of them has been damaged by religion. In many ways, Go Tell It on the Mountain seems like a dark counterpart to Gilead. Where Gilead was all about the quiet uplifting power of faith, about religious belief as a source of sustenance in one’s life, this book shows the other side: the power of religion to condemn, to isolate, to foster guilt, secrecy, and hypocrisy.

So. A powerful book and a thought-provoking book, but not an emotionally engaging book. I wonder if I would feel differently about that if my own experiences were closer to those described in the book.

And now for something completely different…

In addition to Go Tell It on the Mountain, last week I also read the final installment of “Gentlemen of the Road,” Michael Chabon’s serialized adventure story that has been running in the New York Times Magazine for the past few months. I loved it. I’m not sure how well it would work if you read it all at once like a novel (or a novella, actually; it’s not very long), but it works beautifully as a serial. Each chapter was perfectly calibrated for maximum drama every week, and the story was stuffed full of swashbuckling chaos: swordfights! Elephants! Assassinations! Whorehouses! Secret identities! Daring rescues! Grizzled old warriors and revenge plots and cliffhanger after cliffhanger after cliffhanger—everything you could ask for in a story of this kind. At first I found the style off-putting, with its gargantuan sentences and high-falutin’ vocabulary, but once I got used to it I realized that it was just part of the fun. And fun is what the whole thing was. If the point of this was to get me excited for The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, it worked!

You can read the first chapter here, and you can find the rest by searching the NYT archives.

And now I’m reading The Swimming-Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst. I started this a couple months ago, but put it down during the time when I was all stressed out over grad school decision making. I came back to it now because after a run of rather heavy reads (back-to-back books about the war in the Balkans, then a book about tyranny and oppression in Nigeria, then all the race and religion of Go Tell It on the Mountain) I was feeling ready for a book about gay men having sex with each other. I swear, this book is enough to make me concerned for the future of the human race, because in the world according to Hollinghurst, heterosexual men do not seem to exist.

Anyhow, the book concerns the absurdly overprivileged Will Beckwith, the grandson of a lord who has too much money to worry about working, so instead spends his days cavorting around London and trysting with men everywhere he goes. (moiethegreat: it suddenly occurs to me that you should recommend this book to Adam. Now what could have made me think of that?) Will quickly finds himself embroiled in two plotlines: one concerning his affair with a younger West Indian man who may be in trouble with the police, and one revolving around a doddering old lord whose life Will happens to save one day in Hyde Park. It is as yet unclear how these two stories connect to each other, but I suspect they will in time. The book moves along nicely and can be quite funny when it wants to be. I’m enjoying it quite a bit so far.