He is a miserable partner to Giovanni, and we are left with the impression at the book’s end that David will walk away from these events angsty as ever but materially fine, while Giovanni most certainly does not. He struggles with the ideas of home and belonging, both in terms of geography and identity. He’s disappointed in his relationship with his father, in his relations with women (including but not especially Hella), in his feelings for men (before Giovanni, there was a boy in his boyhood as well, though he has repressed this memory), in his view of his own masculinity.

I don’t think he’s supposed to be remotely likeable. The story is told in David’s first-person perspective, and it is full of angst and disquiet. I will not spoil the plot item that is the “most terrible morning of life.” She has decided she wants to be married, and David is too bound up and self-loathing to stay with the man he loves. They go back to Giovanni’s room, and they live together there until Hella’s return some months later, when David leaves (saying nothing to Giovanni) to return to her. (Jacques had intended to hit on him, but got distracted.) This is Giovanni, a young Italian man, with whom David finds interesting conversation, mutual attraction, and a very complicated set of feelings: push/pull, desire/revulsion, love/hate. In her absence, David accompanies a sort of frenemy, Jacques, to a gay bar, where he strikes up a conversation with the bartender. When he proposed, she left to go travel in Spain she needed time and space to think things through. David had been in Paris with a woman named Hella. One of Baldwin’s interesting artistic choices here is a disjointed chronology the story is told from this night-before-the-terrible-morning, in flashbacks, which sometimes jump backward and forward in time, and then we return to the night and the terrible morning. The book opens: “I stand at the window of this great house in the south of France as night falls, the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life.” He takes much of the book, however, to reveal what is so terrible about the morning to come. The novel’s narrator is a young man named David, an American who has been living in Paris. It’s pretty weird to have this relationship with a book I’d never read before.) I have many times referenced a quotation on page 92: “perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.” (My copy of the book falls open naturally to page 92 and the line is highlighted.

I have no idea why it’s taken me this long to read it. I have owned this book for years and years.

Giovanni's room pages