To consider the latest novel by James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk …, is to re-evaluate more than a decade of Baldwin-watching. My response to his work has shifted from admiration of the arrogance of the early essays to rejection of the Old Testament predictability of the later fiction. Admittedly, the rejection of Baldwin's logic as a spokesman reflected a growing disenchantment with specific strategies of the Civil Rights Movement. Baldwin's early work neatly fit that time, in terms of the assault on the so-called liberal conscience. Yet the history of the Sixties will be charted as a maze through which all of us were propelled, its horrors and beauties blurring thought, leaving us to sit in this apparent fall-out period to finger scars and wonder at the dazzle behind the eyes. (p. 51)
Because of expectations, because of change, If Beale Street Could Talk demands the look behind. In this novel we have a synthesis of so many of Baldwin's literary concerns. Familiar is the brooding sensitive cat reared in Harlem, his struggle toward some sense of clarity and achievement in his art and life and the forces which compel him toward some form of destruction…. Familiar, too, is the attack on the use of religion to shut out the horror of the streets, that horror a reflection of the horror and mystery within one's experience. The presence of the fathers, driven before the sons to destruction, has also been typical. But there are some new riffs played out in this novel, riffs which are significant when measured against Baldwin's earlier novels. (p. 52)
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