Continuing Ig Publishing's Bookmarked series, James Baldwin's Another Country offers novelist and essayist Kim McLarin's keen and meditative reflections on Baldwin's novel and how it influenced her writing life. McLarin (Womanish) synthesizes an overview of her own upbringing, education, and professional and personal life with thoughts on how Baldwin's novel inspires questions of race, sex and gender. Highlights from McLarin's many intimate and perceptive insights include her reading of Ida as "the novel's lynchpin, the lingering connection between the dead Rufus and his living white friends, a reminder of their innocent complicity," as well as McLarin's self-disclosing engagement with interracial relationships in the novel. Most compelling is McLarin's elaboration on the fundamental importance of Black sisterhood. It is Ida's attempts to "navigate the treacherous waters of America without sisters at her side," McLarin suggests, that has left her "lost."
McLarin seamlessly traverses the boundaries of literary criticism, personal essay and cultural critique. The book's six-part structure--divided into thematic clusters such as "Men" and "Women," but which overlap--provides some loose organization but allows McLarin to slip between modes in her analysis and make meaningful connections between the book, her lived experience and the contemporary state of the world. Meanwhile, her narrative voice maintains a conversational intimacy with her readers while never letting them completely off the hook. McLarin challenges her readers to look closer, consider for longer and speak more candidly as she herself does in both lauding Baldwin and elaborating on his blind spots. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor