The same passion which saved Fonny got him into trouble and put him in jail. For, you see, he had found his center, his own center, inside him: and it showed. He wasn’t anybody’s ******. And that’s a crime, in this ******* free country.
I’ve read several of Baldwin’s essay collections in the past, but prior to seeing Barry Jenkins’ masterful adaptation of this novel, I’d somehow avoided reading any of Baldwin’s fiction. Safe to say, now that I’ve remedied that with this book, Baldwin’s genius wasn’t particular; it runs every direction you point it, I think. Jenkins’ film adaptation stayed very true to the specifics of the novel, right down to lifting dialogue and narration word for word out of the text, but the novel is a spitfire, whereas the movie is a slow mellowed burn. They’re both magnificent, but encountering one right after the other is sure to give you a bit of a challenge, no matter which order you encounter them in. Baldwin’s novel features a lot of the kind of swooning romanticism Jenkins goes for in his film, but there’s an unflinching, often stinging anger to the novel that Jenkins didn’t try to translate and it makes the reading experience often quite startling. You’ll encounter a lovely passage that Jenkins quoted almost verbatim and be captivated by it, but then Baldwin will undercut with a harsh, often profane passage. Tish’s voice in the novel is bitter and sarcastic in way it wasn’t in the film. This isn’t to attack the film, which picks a lane and stays in it to beautiful effect, but it is to point out that the novel is both morally and emotionally more complicated and less user-friendly. Tish isn’t afraid to call out the reader him or herself, sometimes abusively, for allowing society to exist as it does, for tamping down the righteous indignation she thinks we should feel. But this all comes back to Baldwin’s prose which is as startling, bracing and perfect as ever. There’s a moment, I think, of true genius on every single page of this book, a line or a turn of phrase or even an entire paragraph that would make me often actually close the book and simply turn it over and over in my mind. Baldwin’s a genuine giant of literature, even when the book in question doesn’t even run to two-hundred pages. When Baldwin gets ahold of it, Beale Street doesn’t just talk; it downright sings. 4 stars.
tl;dr – astoundingly brilliant novel is emotionally complicated, startling, bracing and thrilling; a short, but powerful work by one of America’s greatest writers. 4 stars.