Preston King, ‘Disturbing, Overpowering’, 9 August 1968, Tribune, Volume 32, Issue, 32, p.10.

Review of Tell me How Long the Train's Been Gone:

‘I do not know whether this is the best novel that James Baldwin has written. It certainly interested and even moved me to a greater degree than any of the others. I confess to being one of those who, broadly speaking, is more impressed by Mr. Baldwin’s essay than by his fiction, by his direct portrayal of reality than by his creative flights of fancy. Up to a point (up to, perhaps, the first quarter of this novel) I believe this impression is easily substantiated. To begin, his novels have not the significance of his essays. Further, they are somehow more exaggerated and, at the same time, less moving that his essays. In this latest novel, something of that exaggeration, theatricality even, survives still. But in the course of the narrative, the theatricality simple evaporates.

‘What this latest novel has demonstrated to me is that Baldwin can write telling, compelling, superb fiction about what he knows – and that his worst enemy is his sense of style when it asserts itself as an autonomous function. When he drops the cliches, the prettinesses, the irrelevancies, the generalities, to describe a male model (nude) at work, a theatrical interrogation (of Barbara and Leo by Saul), the joy of a mother and father at the almost impossible success of a son, or a conformation between the black celebrity and a family of wealthy white Kentuckians, Baldwin is operating in an element of which he is complete and solitary master [..] Baldwin fashions a world as disquieting, disturbing and depressing as any to be explored in the pages of Dostoyevsky, Zola, Dreiser or the early Steinbeck. Do far from having exhausted his material, it seems to be that he has only just begun to scrutinise it, on an artistic level, in depth. He is in no meaningful sense “limited” by the fact that his material is largely black and American. It would be a pity if he himself were to be persuaded to think so’.