Giovanni's Room is a 1956 novel by James Baldwin. The book concerns the events in the life of an American man living in Paris and his feelings and frustrations with his relationships with other men, particularly an Italian bartender named Giovanni whom he meets at a Parisian gay bar. While he deals with his difficulties with men, he is engaged to an American woman who is travelling in Spain.
Baldwin's novel was considered controversial upon its release in 1956 and has since prompted discussions of many issues, including representations of homosexuality, bisexuality, and struggles with internalized homophobia. The novel also raises questions of social alienation, identity, masculinity, and manhood.
Plot David, a young American man whose girlfriend has gone off to Spain to contemplate marriage, is left alone in Paris and begins an affair with an Italian man, Giovanni. The entire story is narrated by David during "the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life," when Giovanni will be executed for committing murder. Baldwin tackles social isolation, gender and sexual identity crisis, as well as conflicts of masculinity within this story of a young man navigating the public sphere in a society that rejects a core aspect of his sexuality.
Part one David, in Southern France, is about to board a train back to Paris. His girlfriend Hella, to whom he had proposed before she went to Spain, has returned to the United States. As for Giovanni, he is about to be guillotined.
David remembers his first experience with a boy, Joey, who lived in Brooklyn. The two bonded and eventually had a sexual encounter during a sleepover. The two boys began kissing and having sex. The next day, David left, and a little later he took to bullying Joey in order to feel like a real man.
David now lives with his father, who is prone to drinking, and his aunt, Ellen. The latter upbraids the father for not being a good example to his son. David's father says that all he wants is for David to become a real man. Later, David begins drinking, too, and drinks and drives once, ending up in an accident. Back home, the two men talk, and David convinces his father to let him skip college and get a job instead. He then decides to move to France to find himself.
After a year in Paris, penniless, he calls Jacques, an older gay male acquaintance, to meet him for supper so he can ask for money. (In a prolepsis, Jacques and David meet again and discuss Giovanni's fall.) The two men go to Guillaume's gay bar. They meet Giovanni, the new bartender, at whom Jacques tries to make a pass until he gets talking with Guillaume. Meanwhile, David and Giovanni become friends. Later, they all go to a restaurant in Les Halles for breakfast. Jacques enjoins David not to be ashamed to feel love; they eat oysters and drink white wine. Giovanni recounts how he met Guillaume in a cinema; how the two men had dinner together because Giovanni wanted a free meal. He also explains that Guillaume is prone to making trouble. Later, the two men go back to Giovanni's room and they have sex.
Flashing forward again to the day of Giovanni's execution, David is in his house in the South of France. The caretaker comes round for the inventory, as he is moving out the next day. She encourages him to get married, have children, and pray.
Part two David moves into Giovanni's small room. They broach the subject of Hella, about whom Giovanni is not worried, but who reveals the Italian's misogynistic prejudices about women and the need for men to dominate them. David then briefly describes Giovanni's room, which is always in the dark because, even though there are no curtains, Giovanni has painted over the windows with a white cleaning polish in order to create privacy. David goes on to read a letter from his father, asking him to go back to America, but he does not want to do that. The young man walks into a sailor; David believes the sailor is a gay man (who can tell that David desires him), though it is unclear whether this is true or if the sailor is just staring back at David.
A subsequent letter from Hella announces that she is returning in a few days, and David realizes he has to part with Giovanni soon. Setting off to prove to himself that he is not gay, David searches for a woman with whom he can have sex. He meets a slight acquaintance, Sue, in a bar and they go back to her place and have sex; he does not want to see her again and has only slept with her to feel better about himself. When he returns to the room, David finds a hysterical Giovanni, who has been fired from Guillaume's bar and falsely accused of stealing from the till.
Hella returns, and David leaves Giovanni's room without telling him for three days. He writes to his father asking for money for his marriage. The couple then runs into Jacques and Giovanni in a bookshop, which makes Hella uncomfortable because she does not like Jacques's mannerisms. After walking Hella back to her hotel room, David goes to Giovanni's room to talk; the Italian man is distressed. David thinks that they cannot have a life together and feels that he would be sacrificing his manhood if he stays with Giovanni. He leaves but runs into Giovanni several times and is upset by the "fairy" mannerisms that he is developing and his new relationship with Jacques, who is an older and richer man. Sometime later, David finds out that Giovanni is no longer with Jacques and that he might be able to get a job at Guillaume's bar again.
News suddenly comes out that Guillaume has been murdered, and it creates a scandal, as Guillaume was "one of the oldest names in France". David imagines that Giovanni went back into the bar to ask for a job, and that Guillaume "wants Giovanni to undress.... Giovanni realizes that he cannot go through with it." But he "is overcome, and Guillaume has his will. I think [says David] if this had not happened, Giovanni would not have killed him".Quotations from pages 150 and 155 of Vintage paperback edition (2013). He imagines that Guillaume then makes excuses for why he cannot rehire him as a bartender; in reality, they both know that Giovanni is no longer of interest to Guillaume's bar's clientele since so much of his life has been played out in public. Giovanni responds by killing Guillaume in rage. Giovanni attempts to hide, but he is discovered by the police and sentenced to death for murder. Hella and David then move to the South of France, where they discuss gender roles, and Hella expresses her desire to live under a man as a woman. David, wracked with guilt over Giovanni's impending execution, leaves her and goes to Nice for a few days, where he spends his time with a sailor. Hella finds him and discovers his bisexuality, which she says she suspected all along. She bitterly decides to go back to America. The book ends with David's mental pictures of Giovanni's execution and his own guilt.
Characters David, the protagonist and the novel's narrator. A blond American man, David spends a lot of the novel battling with his sexuality and his internalized homophobia. His mother died when he was five years old. Hella, David's girlfriend. They met in a bar in . She is from Minneapolis and moved to Paris to study painting, until she threw in the towel and met David by serendipity. Throughout the novel David intends to marry her. Giovanni, a young Italian man who left his village after his girlfriend gave birth to a dead child. He works as a bartender in Guillaume's gay bar. Giovanni is the titular character whose romantic relationship with David leads them to spend a large amount of the story in his apartment. Giovanni's room itself is very dirty, with countless boxes, peeled wallpaper, a rotten potato, and wine spilled across the place. Jacques, an old American businessman, born in Belgium. He spends money on younger men, one of whom is David. Guillaume, the owner of a gay bar in Paris, who also pays for the company of younger men. The Flaming Princess, an older man who tells David inside the gay bar that Giovanni is very dangerous. Madame Clothilde, the owner of the restaurant in Les Halles. Pierre, a young man at the restaurant, implied to be a rent boy. Yves, a tall, pockmarked young man playing the pinball machine in the restaurant. The Caretaker in the South of France. She was born in Italy and moved to France as a child. Her husband's name is Mario; they lost all their money in the Second World War, and two of their three sons died. Their living son has a son, also named Mario. Sue, a blonde girl from Philadelphia who comes from a rich family and with whom David has a brief and regretful sexual encounter. David's father. His relationship with David is masked by artificial heartiness; he cannot bear to acknowledge that they are not close and he might have failed in raising his son. He married for the second time after David was grown but before the action in the novel takes place. Throughout the novel David's father sends David money to sustain himself in Paris and begs David to return to America. Ellen, David's paternal aunt. She would read books and knit; at parties she would dress skimpily, with too much make-up on. She worried that David's father was an inappropriate influence on David's development. Joey, a neighbor in Coney Island, Brooklyn. David's first same-sex experience was with him. Beatrice, a woman David's father sees. The Fairy, whom David had a relationship with in the army, and who was later discharged for being gay.
Inspiration An argument can be made that David resembles Baldwin in Paris as he left America after growing up under its racism. David, though not a victim of racism like Baldwin himself, is an American who escapes to Paris. However, when asked if the book was autobiographical in an interview in 1980, Baldwin explains he was influenced by his observations in Paris, but the novel was not necessarily shaped by his own experiences:
Literary significance and criticism Even though Baldwin stated that "the sexual question and the racial question have always been entwined", in Giovanni's Room, all of the characters are white. This was a surprise for his readers, since Baldwin was primarily known for his novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, which puts emphasis on the African-American experience. Highlighting the impossibility of tackling two major issues at once in America, Baldwin stated:
Nathan A. Scott Jr., for example, stated that Go Tell It on the Mountain showed Baldwin's "passionate identification" with his people whereas Giovanni's Room could be considered "as a deflection, as a kind of detour." Baldwin's identity as a gay and black man was questioned by both black and white people. His masculinity was called into question, due to his apparent homosexual desire for white men – this caused him to be labelled as similar to a white woman. He was considered to be "not black enough" by many of his peers and colleagues, and labeled subversive by the Civil rights movement leaders.
Baldwin's American publisher, Knopf, suggested that he "burn" the book because the theme of homosexuality would alienate him from his readership among black people. He was told, "You cannot afford to alienate that audience. This new book will ruin your career, because you're not writing about the same things and in the same manner as you were before, and we won't publish this book as a favor to you." However, upon publication critics tended not to be so harsh thanks to Baldwin's standing as a writer. Giovanni's Room was ranked number 2 on a list of the 100 best gay and lesbian novels compiled by The Publishing Triangle in 1999.
On November 5, 2019, the BBC News listed Giovanni's Room on its list of the 100 most influential novels.