Giovanni's Room
Baldwin's 1956 Parisian novel: a white American man falls in love with an Italian bartender while engaged to a woman. The prose is like ice, clear and cold and cutting. It opened a space for literature that simply did not exist before. The most elegantly written American novel about sexuality and shame.
David is "selfish, dishonest, cruel, extremely judgmental," and he uses everyone in reach for money, sex, or cover without ever quite arriving at self-awareness. Readers who need someone to hold onto find the book airless regardless of the sentences. The chronology compounds it, since "much of the story is told out of order" and readers cannot track how long David has been with anyone. Engagement arrives late: one "took nearly half the book before I could engage." A male character's tirade against women sits in the text unexamined. And the style divides, with "the prose wavers between a kind of operatic hysteria" as the complaint.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
