A Ghetto Nerd's Notebook: Why Marilynne Robinson Is One Of James Baldwin's Most Faithful Readers.

In Jack, the great novelist of the Gilead tetralogy pays a beautiful tribute to Baldwin and compels me to reassess his best-selling novel.

( Pic By Gelinas James)

Lionel Trilling and Edmund Wilson are most known as intimidating literary patricians, fathers that loom large in the artlessly personal memoirs of several post-war lit critics. Yet, their Olympian standards and insistence on the discipline of close reading made them two of the most interesting and cosmopolitan critics of James Baldwin's fiction. Most white and respectable black critics of the last quarter of the 20th century viewed Baldwin's fiction as first too parochial, then too in the vein of protest novelists. Trilling and Wilson's Baldwin was a one-person library of Babel, a titan out the gate who created a syntactic galaxy in his prose that called on Henry James, The King James Bible, Black speech, and the tense power of the Chekhov and Tolstoy translated by Constance Garrett.

In his review of Another Country in the New York Herald Tribune, Trilling argued that Baldwin's first two novels-1953's Go Tell It on the Mountain, the tale of a black church family facing a series of reckonings, 1955's Giovanni's Room, the story of a white man abroad trying and failing to…