David

The narrator. A young white American in Paris on his father's money, clear-eyed enough to see what he is doing and too frightened to stop.

What they want

To be ordinary and safe. He says it plainly, walking home along the Seine one evening: he wanted to be inside again, "with the light and safety, with my manhood unquestioned, watching my woman put my children to bed."

The book

Cover of Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin

Giovanni's RoomJames Baldwin, 1956

An American in Paris, engaged to one person and in love with another, in Baldwin's shortest novel.

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At a glance

In the book: Narrator — a young white American in Paris, living on money sent from home
Age: About twenty-six; his father writes that he is "pushing thirty"
Born: San Francisco, where his mother is buried. She died when he was five
Raised by: His father, and his father's unmarried sister Ellen, in Brooklyn and New York
Engaged to: Hella Lincoln, an American from Minneapolis, away in Spain for most of the book
Never says: Out loud, to anyone in the novel, what he actually wants

Who they are in the book

Spoiler-free

David is the novel's narrator, a young white American living in Paris on money his father sends him from home. He is the only voice in the book. Everything a reader learns about the other nine people here arrives through him, and he is not a reliable witness to his own life.

He tells the story in a single night, standing at the window of a rented house in the south of France with a bottle at his elbow, waiting for the morning on which Giovanni, the Italian barman he loved and left, will be executed in Paris. He gives that ending away on the first page, so nothing that follows is suspense. It is a confession delivered after nothing can be changed.

He is about twenty-six. He was born in San Francisco, his mother died when he was five, and he was raised by his father and by his father's unmarried sister, Ellen. What makes him hard to dismiss is that he can see what he is doing. He describes his own evasions accurately, in careful sentences, and goes on making them.

How the book draws them

Appearance, manner, and tone — as the book sketches them, in our words.

What he looks likeHe describes himself once, in the opening paragraph, by watching his reflection in a darkening window: tall, "perhaps rather like an arrow," his blond hair gleaming. Then comes the line doing the real work — "My face is like a face you have seen many times" — followed by his ancestors conquering a continent. He introduces himself as a familiar American type before he introduces himself as a person.
The night with JoeyAs a teenager, staying at a friend's house near Coney Island in Brooklyn one summer weekend, he grabs Joey's head the way he had done many times before. This time something is different. They kiss, he writes, "as it were, by accident." Both are frightened, and what he remembers is not shame: "out of this astounding intolerable pain came joy, we gave each other joy that night."
The morning afterHe wakes first, looks at Joey asleep beside him, and the fear arrives fully formed: "But Joey is a boy." Lying there he decides to allow no room in his life for what has happened. He gets up, showers, dresses, has breakfast ready before Joey wakes, and invents an excuse to go home. He does not say the decision aloud, because that "would have broken my will."
What he did to Joey afterwardsHe stopped visiting. Meeting Joey by accident near the end of the summer, he made up a long and completely untrue story about a girl he was seeing. At school he took up with an older, rougher crowd and was deliberately cruel, and he records the mechanism without softening it: "the sadder this made him, the nastier I became." Joey's family moved away and David never saw him again.
The lie he singles outHe has told a great many lies by the time the book opens, and repents one of them by name: he told Giovanni he had never slept with a boy before. He had. He adds that Giovanni never believed it. The lie matters to him because it was told to the one person he might have told the truth to.
What he thinks willpower isHe describes himself as someone who prides himself on making a decision and carrying it through, then dismantles the compliment. People who believe they are masters of their destiny, he writes, "can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception," and what look like their decisions are "elaborate systems of evasion, of illusion." He is describing the decision he made in Joey's bed, and every one he has made since.

Their ending, and the commentary — spoilers aheadHow the book leaves them, what happened after, and what the record says. Open when you're ready.

He leaves. When Hella returns from Spain he packs a suitcase and walks out of Giovanni's room with almost no explanation, and

The rented house in the south of France is where the rest comes apart.

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