In the opening pages we learn that David’s fiancée Hella is returning to America, that the titular Giovanni has been sentenced to death – for what crime we are not told – and is awaiting the guillotine, and that we meet David on the worst morning of his life. Much of what follows happens in flashbacks as David tries to make sense of his relationship with Giovanni, their love and pain, and where things went wrong.
Colm Tóibín writes about Giovanni’s room in the New Yorker has described Baldwin as “the greatest American prose stylist of his generation.” The novel is indeed an object of astonishing beauty. Baldwin’s prose has the rare ability to put emotion on the page while remaining dazzlingly expressive, a language that is at once natural and elegant.
In his first collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin speculated that his style was characterized by a mixture of
the King James Bible, the rhetoric of the shop church, something ironic, violent and constantly understated in the language of the blacks – and something of Dickens’ love of bravura wit.
As a teenager, Baldwin became a successful preacher, like his father. In his masterful autobiographical essay “Letter from a Region of my Mind,” Baldwin writes that this newfound calling, for which he felt exceptionally gifted,
meant that there were hours and even days when I could not be disturbed – not even by my father. I had immobilized him. It took me a little longer to realize that I had immobilized myself as well and was running from nothing.
This linguistic gift that Baldwin developed in the pulpit – the power to persuade, to enliven, to elevate, to condemn – gives Giovanni’s room with a resonant metaphysical power that reminds us of the moral and aesthetic splendor that remains available to us despite our human weaknesses.
This is related to the deep and paralyzing fear that comes with the realization that you have been behaving so extraordinarily eloquently only to avoid confronting a difficult truth.
David admits this as he reflects on the story he is about to tell:
I believe today that if I had had the slightest inkling that the self I would find would turn out to be the same self I had been running from for so long, I would have stayed home.
David’s narrative is an exercise in self-deception and self-discovery. He first meets Giovanni in a gay bar in Paris, and soon they begin sleeping together and living together in Giovanni’s shabby, cramped apartment.
Giovanni is beautiful and has an unabashed charm, and after inviting David to drink white wine and eat oysters in the Parisian morning sun, he embodies the wonders of Europe, its charm and its strangeness.
He offers David a way out, a chance to free himself from the burden of the American destiny. But at the same time he instills fear and terror in him. He shows David his many irreconcilable contradictions: as an American who is both repelled and fascinated by his homeland, and as a homosexual who is attracted to men.
In this stormy bond, David sees only himself. Overwhelmed by his own feelings, Giovanni is reduced to an instrument of lust and self-loathing and obscures the personality of his lover.
