Big City Book Club Discusses James Baldwin's 'Another Country' on Wednesday Night Join us tonight from 7-10 Eastern time. Leave your comments and questions now to help guide the discussion. James Baldwin's "Another Country," published in 1962, was written over the course of 13 years, in at least three cities and two continents. Begun in New York, the unfinished novel went with Baldwin to Paris and later to Istanbul, whose dateline provides the book's end note. The project had become a source of torture for Baldwin. The characters, he said, refused to talk to him. Stymied and drinking too much, he eventually took up an actor friend's invitation to go to Turkey, where diminished distractions permitted him to finish a book that had seemed unpublishable. At times, the process and struggle make themselves all too evident. Much of the writing in "Another Country" feels forced and stilted, the miles of the journey manifest on the page. In the late 1940s, in the Partisan Review, Baldwin coined the phrase "protest fiction," a derisive designation for those African-American themed novels in which black characters were too obviously victimized by their circumstances, or were made to seem too mythically sexual. The social agendas in these novels were too blatant for Baldwin's liking, but reading "Another Country," I wondered over and over whether it could withstand his own critical apparatus. The novel gives us Rufus Scott, a jazz musician, defined by the psychological traumas largely inflicted on him by race. Baldwin avoids making him entirely sympathetic by giving him a misogynistic bent that compels him to beat his white girlfriend, doubly a victim because she is poor and uneducated. Rufus and his friend Vivaldo are sexually fluid; they involve themselves with men and women in ways that are not commonplace in the contemporary novel. I wondered as I read whether this added to my sense of the book's being seeming dated. "Another Country" is not the sort of book that offers a vision of New York that could easily pass for what the city feels like today. I'm not suggesting by any means that we live in a racial paradise. The book's anachronisms stem more from the sense that characters define themselves almost entirely by their erotic lives. What felt most true in some regard was the depiction of the career of Richard, Vivaldo's mentor, and his wife Cass's reaction to it. Richard hasn't written a sellout book to make money - "if only!" Cass proclaims - but rather because sellout quality writing is really all he is capable of, lacking as he does the depth and complexity to do better. So, where should we begin our discussion of "Another Country?" The prodigious drinking suggests that "Mad Men" perhaps isn't entirely hyperbolic. What do we make of Baldwin's racial politics? His view of friendship and its obligations? And what, in the end, is he saying about bisexuality? The live conversation starts tonight at 7 Eastern time and runs until 10. Please join us then or leave your comments and questions now to help guide the discussion.