Another Country

The introduction of Eric is the only part of the novel set outside of New York City. The contrast between Eric’s small cottage in France and the cramped apartments of New York is stark. The home shared by Yves and Eric is almost idyllic: their seaside property provides them with privacy and solace; they can spend the day in the sea, sipping wine beside the fire in the evening while a friendly older woman cooks them dinner. Eric and Yves have a kitten, they have comfort, and they have a life together. In contrast, New York is always either too hot or too cold. The apartments are small and force the occupants into close contact with occasionally hostile neighbors. Heating and air conditioning units break, food is rarely available, and characters consume alcohol constantly to distract themselves from their living conditions. The contrast between France and New York suggests that Eric needed a new environment so he could understand himself. He is settled and content with Yves, one of the few characters to enjoy genuine happiness for an extended period. While Eric had the opportunity to escape the alienated, oppressive conditions of his society and throw himself into a new and strange environment, the other characters are not so lucky. Eric benefits from being able to escape, however briefly, as his escape to France allowed him the opportunity to learn about his real self.

Ida is one of the first characters to understand the intersectional nature of oppression in the society they inhabit. While other characters struggle to come to terms with the reality of racism or sexism as individual, discrete issues, Ida’s relationship with her brother has taught her that overlapping discriminations can be a complex and challenging problem. Rufus was an African American man in a predominantly white society. He was a bisexual man in a society in which heterosexuality is the default expectation. Rufus was bullied, oppressed, and discriminated against because of his race and his sexuality, meaning that he struggled to find a place to belong. As Ida spends more time with Vivaldo, she begins to understand how few people Rufus had who could truly understand him. She might have empathized with his experiences of racism, but only Eric could truly understand what it meant to be oppressed because of his sexuality. These overlapping discriminations clarify the intense tension that defined Rufus’s life and drove him to suicide. With Vivaldo still struggling to understand one form of discrimination, Ida comes to terms with the way in which various types of discrimination intersect.

While Vivaldo struggles to empathize with social issues like racism, he does find solidarity with Eric based on their similar experiences. Vivaldo relates to Eric because they have both loved people from the same family. Eric once loved Rufus, and Vivaldo now loves Ida, so Vivaldo looks to Eric for help in understanding how to navigate his difficult situation. Vivaldo’s alienation makes him desperate. In an attempt to feel some sense of solidary or understanding with anyone, he obliterates all nuance in the differences between his and Eric’s relationships. Vivaldo frames the similarity in the simplest possible terms: two romantic relationships with members of the same family. He fails to comprehend the nuanced differences between homosexual and heterosexual relationships in a society that oppresses gay men while also failing to appreciate how Ida’s grief for her lost brother might shape her personality in a way that never affected Rufus. Vivaldo’s clumsy search for empathy is demonstrative of his intense feeling of alienation. He is so desperate to feel close to someone and to share his problems with someone that he draws the broadest possible comparisons between himself and others, stripping away the finer details of people’s lives so he can relate to them on his own terms.