[In] Another Country, there are no effective controls—of form, of language, of moral content, of theme…. [Metaphorically, the "country" of the title] is that misty region on the nether side of society where alienated men and women act out the racial and sexual—and, improbably, the international, or at least the Franco-American—encounter. The characters—black and white, beat and square, irresolutely straight and avowedly homosexual—are in their variety meant to describe the topography of that other country, and to dramatize the way life is lived there….

Baldwin loses control almost immediately, and never recovers it; and the manner in which he fails lies at the heart of the novel's totally disabling flaws. With catastrophically absurd and chaotic results for the work as fiction, and as criticism of life, he takes his metaphors, his allegory, literally: not illuminating in some imaginative and contingent sense, but equivalent...