If Beale Street Could Talk

"[This novel] is economically, almost poetically constructed, and may certainly be read as a kind of allegory, which refuses conventional outbursts of violence, preferring to stress the provisional, tentative nature of our lives....Tish's voice comes to seem absolutely natural and we learn to know her from the inside out. Even her flights of poetic fancy...are convincing. Also convincing is Baldwin's insistence upon the primacy of emotions like love, hate, or terror: it is not sentimentality, but basic psychology....[This] is a moving, painful story. It is so vividly human and so obviously based upon reality, that it strikes us as timeless--an art that has not the slightest need of esthetic tricks, and even less need of fashionable apocalyptic excesses."Baldwin, James A. is the author of 'If Beale Street Could Talk', published 2006 under ISBN 9780307275936 and ISBN 0307275930.