For this Black History Month I finally (after too many years) read James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, which, at fewer than 200 pages, also counts for “short books for a short month.” I think I bought my copy at the National Museum of African-American History and Culture sometime in 2019. Five years is, sadly, not an atypical amount of time for something to sit on my bookshelf before I actually read it.
Reviewing Baldwin feels vaguely blasphemous not just because he is widely recognized as one of the greats but also because he is a Black man writing in the 1940s and 1950s and I am a white girl who wasn’t even born until the 1980s, so what am I gonna do, say he’s wrong about anything? I don’t know, I’m reading to learn here. Also, the first three essays are all critical reviews of books and movies that I haven’t read or seen; he could be making them up whole cloth and I wouldn’t know (I assume someone else would have noticed by now if that were the case, of course). But anyway all I can say about the first section of the book is that I’m not always sure what he’s talking about due to my lack of familiarity with the subject matter, but he is entertainingly savage in the particular digs he makes at these pieces of media. Baldwin is not known for showering praise upon pretty much anyone or anything so it’s probably unsurprising to see that he doesn’t really like “protest novels” or “social novels” by either white or black authors, although his diagnoses of what’s wrong with them differs.
The other essays are largely biographical, about life in Harlem, a job in New Jersey, his father, newspapers, getting arrested in Paris. Baldwin is unsparing in his analysis of the social and psychological ills of, again, basically everybody. Some of it is dryly funny in a way that Baldwin always manages to immediately make you feel bad about finding funny, because it really is a blistering look at a lot of harsh realities (and, perhaps more importantly, unrealities). There are a lot of the sorts of really profound quotes that people like to dig out of the essays and post as standalones and many of them do sort of do that themselves in the essays themselves, kind of jumping off the page and slapping you in the face, but they really work much better as punctuation of whatever tragically human anecdote Baldwin was telling us.
For book club I might have to google for smarter discussion questions than the ones I can come up with. It probably wouldn’t go amiss for me to re-read some of the more complex essays, like the titular one about Baldwin’s father’s death and the riots that broke out in Harlem at the same time. As one of the few non-Jews in the group I’m also particularly interested in the discussion that will ensue about the second half of “The Harlem Ghetto,” which is about Black anti-Semitism and Jewish anti-Blackness, and the causes and effects of each and their relationship to each other and the wider social structures of the U.S. I am personally more “at home” in the sections on “let’s talk about why newspapers are so bad” and, of course, the later essays where Baldwin dunks on the French (and on Francophiles), so I think it will be instructive.
Reviewing Baldwin feels vaguely blasphemous not just because he is widely recognized as one of the greats but also because he is a Black man writing in the 1940s and 1950s and I am a white girl who wasn’t even born until the 1980s, so what am I gonna do, say he’s wrong about anything? I don’t know, I’m reading to learn here. Also, the first three essays are all critical reviews of books and movies that I haven’t read or seen; he could be making them up whole cloth and I wouldn’t know (I assume someone else would have noticed by now if that were the case, of course). But anyway all I can say about the first section of the book is that I’m not always sure what he’s talking about due to my lack of familiarity with the subject matter, but he is entertainingly savage in the particular digs he makes at these pieces of media. Baldwin is not known for showering praise upon pretty much anyone or anything so it’s probably unsurprising to see that he doesn’t really like “protest novels” or “social novels” by either white or black authors, although his diagnoses of what’s wrong with them differs.
The other essays are largely biographical, about life in Harlem, a job in New Jersey, his father, newspapers, getting arrested in Paris. Baldwin is unsparing in his analysis of the social and psychological ills of, again, basically everybody. Some of it is dryly funny in a way that Baldwin always manages to immediately make you feel bad about finding funny, because it really is a blistering look at a lot of harsh realities (and, perhaps more importantly, unrealities). There are a lot of the sorts of really profound quotes that people like to dig out of the essays and post as standalones and many of them do sort of do that themselves in the essays themselves, kind of jumping off the page and slapping you in the face, but they really work much better as punctuation of whatever tragically human anecdote Baldwin was telling us.
For book club I might have to google for smarter discussion questions than the ones I can come up with. It probably wouldn’t go amiss for me to re-read some of the more complex essays, like the titular one about Baldwin’s father’s death and the riots that broke out in Harlem at the same time. As one of the few non-Jews in the group I’m also particularly interested in the discussion that will ensue about the second half of “The Harlem Ghetto,” which is about Black anti-Semitism and Jewish anti-Blackness, and the causes and effects of each and their relationship to each other and the wider social structures of the U.S. I am personally more “at home” in the sections on “let’s talk about why newspapers are so bad” and, of course, the later essays where Baldwin dunks on the French (and on Francophiles), so I think it will be instructive.