Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

James Baldwin's first novel is thinly disguised autobiography that ultimately reads more like a personal excoriation of fundamentalist Christianity, laying bare its hypocrisies and general foolishness in acid terms. It's a short novel but full of backstories and the complexities of blended and extended families. Set in Harlem, the preacher Gabriel Grimes and his family undergo convulsions of grief when the second son is killed stabbed in the throat. It's Gabriel's second marriage. His first was in the South and produced no children. In fact, the family history is so complex, and so central to all the themes, that exposition often feels like it's running breathlessly to keep pace with the narrative of Roy's death. The novel is full of Bible stories and biblical language, starting with the reason-for-the-season Christmas carol in the title. For teenage John Grimes, the novel is more about climbing the mountain than it is about saying something, and the climb is not easy, which makes the joyfulness of the carol referenced a little weirdly distracting. Much of the narrative comes directly from Baldwin's life—same kind of father, same kind of relationship, same turn to Jesus at 14, etc. For all the artfulness of Go Tell It on the Mountain—and there is plenty—it feels more like something Baldwin needed to get out of his system. Its freewheeling structure and experimental passages produce isolated remarkable fragments, such as a night-long conversion experience, but it's uneven. My favorite character is Gabriel's sister Florence with her lifelong seething resentment of Gabriel. I think a better novel might be the same story written from Florence's point of view by a woman. Obviously that is not the novel we have. Gabriel, for his part, is just too easy to judge and dispense with. As Florence points out, he is too often the cause of problems in the lives of others. I didn't think anyone in that family should want to have anything to do with him. That's my judgment, but the result was I got quickly tired of him and his catalog of sins. Florence is the only one who sees him clearly in this novel, and she does exactly what I would—puts him behind her, moving to the North. When he shows up there 20 years later, after he has caused a lot more grief down home, there's little she can do. Of course he causes more in the North, all of it predictable. There's a lot that's good and even great in this novel, but it's hard for me to agree it's the best thing Baldwin ever did, let alone one of the great novels of the 20th century.

In case it's not at the library.