Reviews serve many purposes, but the main, sometimes disavowed, one is essentially to answer the question for would-be readers, "Is this worth my time? Should I read this book?" It's kind of nice that I don't really have to try to answer that here. It's , man, you don't need me to tell you to read it. You'll read it sometime. "Is this worth my time? Should I read this book?" Are you really asking that? Grow up.
Maybe I'll just list some surprises. One is that this is more of an extended short story, what's called a novella, than a novel, and that the particular "reading temporality" of this length--you could knock this out in an evening--is wonderful. The events, the beautiful words, just flow along, both swiftly and amply, without either bloat or any sense of restriction, time enough for the plot as well as wonderful aphorisms. Here's a great one: French is described as "that curiously measured and vehement language, which sometimes reminds me of stiffening egg white and sometimes of stringed instruments but always of the underside and aftermath of passion." Stiffening egg white! Practically Nabokovian!
Second surprise. Baldwin is known for his beautiful writing and his measured, elegant emotionality. But this isn't the same thing as sentimentality. Actually, the depiction of gay Paris here, where the young, beautiful, and broke are systematically preyed upon by a bourgeois gerontocracy of embittered "dirty old men"--part of a wider world where everyone is lying to themselves and using others to some extent, no matter how good-hearted--reminds me of the acid, black vision of Fassbinder's Fox and His Friends.
Final surprise. The lucidity, the "objectivity," of writing like this unconsciously makes you think the real-life James Baldwin must have had it together, as if he were wisely shaking his head off-screen at these broken souls and the terrible tangles they let themselves get caught up in, or, if he did live through it, overcame it. Wrong! I recently picked up the latest issue of Bookforum and happened on an article that makes it clear Baldwin lived his life as a continual string of feverish all-or-nothing romances with men (often """straight""" or ambivalently committed to him), careening from devotion to despair all the time like a teenager. So for all you artists: Keep fucking that emotionally inaccessible guy/girl, it's fine!