Quicksand, by Nella Larsen

First off, a shout-out to internet personality Tyler King, who taught me to edit the html of the posts with the poems in them so they stopped doing an annoying thing where words would break at the edge of the posts. Thanks, Tyler!

This post is about a book called Quicksand, which was written by your friend and mine Nella Larsen. Nella Larsen had a rather interesting life; she only wrote a couple of books, and after that a rather dubious plagiarism charge by someone whose name no one quite remembers brought a quick end to a quite promising literary career. It's perhaps for that reason no one much studied Nella Larsen. But her two books, Quicksand and Passing, seem to be popping up all over the place on college syllabi lately; one might say she's become sort of fashionable to teach. Last summer my American Lit instructor succumbed to the tyranny of trend, and so we read Quicksand.

All that really makes it sound like I don't think she's a good writer, and that she's getting taught only because of fashion; au contraire, I think the woman was fantastic, and I'm glad the wind blew the right way that time. Quicksand was wonderful.

The story itself is about a woman named Helga Crane, who is half white and half black; not so unusual in itself, but Helga is an aesthete. She wants pretty things, she wants luxury, and she wants freedom from convention; those  drives really propel her, and they make her a fantastically unconventional character. Helga couldn't really give a damn about the struggle for civil rights, or improving her race. She seems to feel like she should care about them, and she wonders why she doesn't, but in the end, she just doesn't care. She gives up a job teaching at a prestigious school for black children for unemployment in Chicago because she feels that the atmosphere is stifling.

So what this does is gives us access to the psychology of a character who struggles with questions of race and identity, but rather than externalizing them into a struggle to change the world, wholly internalizes them. And while that's a refreshing change of pace, things really don't go so well for Miss Crane. She ends of rejecting a couple of marriage proposals and moving to Denmark (both Helga and the esteemed Miss Larsen had Danish ancestry), where her near-black skin makes her a societal curiosity and a pawn for the social advancement of her Danish relatives.

So all this internalizing and agonizing over questions of race leaves her deliriously wandering the streets of New York after a brief period of feeling like she belonged in Harlem. Helga's paradoxical search for a community in which she fits while desiring to hold herself back is the drive of the environment of the novel, as opposed to her internal drives. And then she marries a southern preacher, and all of it turns out to be pointless; she has too many children and (probably) dies while being chained to a man and a community that she hates with people who hate her.

One of the triumphs of literature in general and the novel in particular, especially in the hands of extremely skilled writers, is its ability to give its audience a look at a foreign psychology. Quicksand does that in a refreshing way that radically inverts some conventions, which, while important and moving, can seem rather trite through overexposure. I highly enjoyed it.

PS: If you'd like to read Quicksand, and if you haven't I think you should, you can buy a sweet copy of it here.