Composed mostly in flashback, [Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone] follows Proudhammer through a bitter Harlem childhood, the birth of ambition toward the stage, a long love affair with a white actress, a homosexual love alongside that, the beginning of political awareness, a step toward identification with his people's new militancy.

A half-dozen themes, none of which is realized, none brought to any conclusion in the imagination, they exist almost as mutually exclusive, as though in setting out to do a big, complex, invented life Baldwin had been unable to find a principle of coherence for its parts…. [What] is missing is any sense of artistic inevitability, any conviction that things have to be this way and no other, that one scene prepares the next, one image its successor, one emphasis of language its corollary or alternative….

His chief problem is that he cannot find a...