Sometimes, when we consider a novel of great complexity—one about which we have conviction, one which we believe is going to ring down the ages and speak meaningfully to generations yet unborn—it pays dividends to put aside the buzz and come to the book with a mind as close to a tabula rasa as possible. That's not to advocate a kind of New Criticism or Intentionalist Fallacy approach, however. Indeed, knowing a little about Baldwin—his life, his other writings—greatly fosters understanding, in this case. It's just that, in many instances, the buzz completely misses the main points.

Inevitably, a reader researching Another Country will be told that it was an extremely controversial novel for its time, a lightning rod. It takes up subjects that were simply not discussed—interracial romance, gay romance, extramarital affairs. At the same time, though, it deals with wholly familiar and conventional subjects—racism, same race romance, 'straight' romance, professional jealousy. One would be completely justified in saying, I think, that the book is about human relationships, period, and leave it at that.

This is not to say that Baldwin wasn't interested in social issues, in race relations, in urban studies, in matters of class and economics. Of course he was. The book is set in a time and place when it was impossible not to be. But, at the baseline, this is a book about emotions—fragility, vulnerability, availability, the capacity to touch and feel and hurt.

Rufus Scott is a young black jazz drummer of great promise. After a particularly hot gig, before he even gets off the bandstand, he's approached by a shy, tentative white girl from the South named Leona. After a few small, empty exchanges, they agree to go off to an uptown party. Let the madness begin. (This sequence, in addition to kick starting the plot, is important for another reason: in it, Baldwin introduces a kind of expressionism that he will employ many times throughout the course of the story. A nameless, faceless person—a virtual shadow or silhouette—is employed as the action's commentator. Here, it's a sax player in the band, an anonymous sonic fury. Later on, this expressionistic narrator will assume many other forms—a pervert in a sleazy bar, a successful singer, college boys in a bar who are 'mad with chastity', and, most ominously, in the seemingly innumerable policemen who seem to pop up in almost every scene.)

Rufus and Leona become lovers. In the flow of the narrative, we learn that Rufus once had a white male lover—an actor named Eric—whom he abused. Eric became an expatriate, living—for a time—in France (as did, of course, Baldwin). Rufus begins to treat Leona as cruelly as he did Eric, and beats her because of the psychological torment he believes she is deliberately laying on him. (A history of her mental illness is hinted at without much detail.) Enter Vivaldo, a white, aspiring novelist, the linchpin of all the central characters, the center of the network. He visits the apartment of the lovers and finds Rufus sitting on the bed, insane, brandishing a knife. Leona, beaten black and blue, is naked in the bathroom and out of her mind. Vivaldo provides sanctuary. Rufus shortly goes AWOL, dropping out of sight for more than six weeks. Things end disastrously for Rufus and Leona. Vivaldo enters into a relationship with Ida (Rufus' younger sister), which seems to share many of the negative qualities of the other couple's union. Richard and Cass are a slightly older white couple, with two small boys, who have been friends of the group for a long time (Richard was Vivaldo's English teacher in school). They introduce Ida and Vivaldo to Steve Ellis, a television producer. In the meantime, Eric, having started to land good roles as an actor, is returning to New York, shortly to be joined by his French lover, Yves. There's crossfire everywhere: Eric has an affair with Cass, and sleeps with Vivaldo. Ida has an affair with Steve Ellis. Vivaldo is jealous of Richard's novel being published, of Rufus' success in music, of Eric's success as an actor ("Everyone's famous but me.") Richard is jealous of Vivaldo's commitment to his artistic ideals, as is the despicable Ellis. Ida and Rufus both take out their intense racial frustrations on their lovers. Richard also mistakenly believes it is Vivaldo that Cass is seeing on the side. Ida accuses Vivaldo of trying to stall her career as a singer.

None of this makes for easy reading. And, by that, I mean not that the reading is especially difficult but that it's extraordinarily painful. Much of the prose cuts like shards of jagged glass. Certain sentences rocket off the page with such ardor they make the blood in one's temples pulse. The scenes in which Richard and Cass' marriage begins to disintegrate are capable of making one's hands shake. Early on, in flashback (flashback—like expressionism—by the way, is another narrative technique of which Baldwin makes great and frequent use), Rufus and Vivaldo are whipped in a barroom brawl. Baldwin's skill of description here is like surgery, a laparotomy. The reader has no choice but to become involved.

The city, too, emerges as a kind of character, a mise-en-scene in which these characters are fated to play out their lives. ("The weight of this city was murderous.") In one especially vivid episode, one of the principals hurls himself to death, off the George Washington Bridge at night, in winter. As a kind of experiment, I made the trek to the bridge on a frigidly cold night and stood gazing down into the savage dark currents of the Hudson River subjacent, closing my eyes for a moment, imagining myself flying through the night winds to the freeing water below. Let me tell you: Baldwin got the scene exactly, 100% right. Most of the scenes describing the mood, feel and look of the city, have this same, uniform, high level of accuracy. (An interesting literary timeline of the evolution of New York over the decades might take Another Country for the sixties; Sol Yurick's The Warriors for the seventies; Jay McInerny's Bright Lights, Big City for the eighties; and Don DeLillo's Mao II for the nineties.) Baldwin is particularly attuned to the sense of smell, frequently alluding to this stimulus around his characters.

In spite of all the confusion, betrayal, and sexual wheeling and dealing, the book essentially ends where it begins. Everyone is wounded, yet together, and this can be interpreted as hopeful. The quest for love, if not exactly attained, is, at least, understood a bit better. The frustrating—and frustrated—yearning for love is everywhere in this novel. Early on, the riffs emanating from a saxophone are interpreted as meaning Do you love me? Do you love me? In another scene, as Cass and Vivaldo ride uptown in a cab, the radio plays a song whose chorus is Love me! In a moment of uncertainty, as Vivaldo waits for Ida, he thinks, Oh God, make her love me! We see what's happening, here; Baldwin creates a universe in which the characters' doubts about love become self fulfilling prophecies at every turn; the doubts within their own minds become objectified in the world outside themselves. They burn, they ache, they long for love. Tthey're so hungry for it—and, at the same time, so very ignorant as to what it is and how to attain it—that the scenarios in which they find themselves begin to echo their internal love-starved cries.

What is it about love that is so elusive for these people? At one point, Ida tells Eric that love is about being torn limb from limb. Richard is so distanced from Cass that the bio on the jacket of his novel mentions their two kids, but not her. The title comes from a thought of Vivaldo, "Love is a country he knew nothing about." The line is an excellent summing up of almost every character's feelings: Strangers' faces hold no secrets because the imagination doesn't invest them with any. And Vivaldo's questions to Eric: How can you live if you don't love? How can you live if you do?

There are numerous mirrors as well as reflections. For example, Richard despises Rufus as a coward for beating Leona; yet, when he learns of Cass' adultery, he hits her savagely. Rufus has bitter, hateful memories of boot camp in the South, when a drill instructor kicked in his teeth; both of his lovers, Eric and Leona, are from the South. Rufus and Leona are stared at with contempt in the streets, as are Vivaldo and Ida. In Manhattan, apartment buildings "seem to be watching'; in Paris, Yves and Eric are "watched by the cathedral all day". We learn that, as a teenager, Eric had a black male lover in Alabama. Ida, Leona and Rufus are all, at one point or another, described as being part adult and part child, while Eric and Vivaldo "roll in the bed like children". The overlaps are many, and obvious. Both Vivaldo and Richard confront their women about their affairs; both women suggest they talk about it later; both men use almost the identical wording in insisting it be talked about right now.

Sometimes, the symbolism Baldwin uses in addressing racism—for example, a chess set—are a tad obvious and paper thin; at other times, his commentary on the topic is absolutely on the mark. He provides a skewering of white liberals in an episode where Cass' and Richard's two sons are beat up in the park by a group of black boys. The boys ask their parents if it was because they're white, and the parents insist that's not the reason though it's perfectly obvious, to all parties present, that it is. And this type of soporific denial doesn't occur solely with racial matters—everyone seems to be in a state of denial and willful ignorance about his/her sexuality and his/her partner. The lone exception is Eric, who sees everything with great clarity and remarks, at one point, "I think sin should be fun." He has no grand illusions about love and he always lets his lovers know that he is really, truly in love with Yves. There are no empty promises and wishes from Eric.

Another Country is an experience both shattering and uplifting, a book that undoubtedly took great courage to write. It works beautifully—both as a story and as an example of how to tell a story, executing occasionally tricky time shifts with an easy confidence, and the writing, itself, is often brilliant ("...his fingernails were jagged and in mourning"!!). It's a timeless novel because it embraces universal concerns, yet it's also very place-time specific—nailing the ambience of that time and place perfectly. James Baldwin's Another Country requires, and deserves, several careful readings.