Giovanni's Room is the best American novel dealing with homosexuality I have read….
[From a recounting of the plot, Giovanni's Room] sounds like a painful novel, which it certainly is. It also sounds like a meretriciously fashionable-sensational one, which it is not…. He successfully avoids the cliché literary attitudes: overemphasis on the grotesque, and the use of homosexuality as a facile symbol for the estrangement which makes possible otherwise unavailable insights into the workings of "normal" society and "normal" people; in short, the Homosexual as Artist.
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