I don’t want that stand-still, hap-hazard kind of love. I’m just as hungry as a dog for a knowing and a doing love. You love like a coward.
This is the final of the four novels Zora Neale Hurston published during her lifetime and it’s very different from the ones that have come before. The two main characters, and almost all of the supporting characters, are white, for one thing and perhaps this is why it’s considered a lesser work when it comes to serious scholarship about her work. I’m glad I didn’t know that, though, because I consider it to be easily her second best book, behind the justly acclaimed Their Eyes Were Watching God. The novel centers around the tumultuous romantic relationship between Arvay Henson, a strong-willed young woman, and Jim Merserve, an equally strong-willed man. That their relationship is going to be rocky is evident from their very first encounter and rocky, to say the least it is. We follow them through their rough-and-tumble “courtship.” At one point, Arvay feigns a seizure to get Jim to leave her alone; a bit later, they have a sexual encounter that is violent enough to make modern readers (and perhaps readers at the time) cringe. But you’ll cringe a lot in this book as the two are both physically and emotionally cruel to each other as the years roll on and we see them move into marriage, parenthood, etc. They’re visited, like all Hurston characters, by great tragedy, but they make things harder on themselves by virtue of their flaws as well. Arvay and Jim are, in my opinion, the most fully rounded and fascinating characters of Hurston’s fiction. The characters in Their Eyes Were Watching God were archetypal and it works in context of that book, but even they don’t have the layers and complexity of Arvay and Jim. At any given moment, you’ll want to slap one or the other of them for their juvenile selfishness, but a couple of pages later, you’ll find yourself feeling deep empathy for them in their struggles and, ultimately, I found myself only wanting them to find some way to make it and have a little happiness along the way. This book is perhaps a hair long and some may find the way the circular nature of the central relationship here to be repetitive. Frankly, I suppose it is, but it captures something profound about the way relationships can fracture, reform, refracture, reform, etc. as two people struggle to come to terms with each other and with themselves. After having such a negative experience with Moses, Man of the Mountain, Hurston’s third novel, I very nearly gave this one a miss, especially because it was so long. I’m very, very glad I didn’t. It’s a character driven, emotionally complicated masterpiece. 4 stars.
tl;dr – Hurston’s final novel is a compelling story of a tumultuous relationship; psychologically and emotionally complex, this one is an overlooked masterpiece. 4 stars