One always approaches an avowed classic, especially one from a very different era, with certain trepidations. And this book certainly isn’t perfect, but it’s fascinating in a lot of ways and not most as a curio. It’s the tale of Janie, a poor black woman who finds her life driven predominantly by her relationships with three men. Probably the biggest hurdle the modern reader will find here is Hurston’s heavy use of dialect in the dialogue; you kind of have to know this book was written by a black woman or you’ll think it’s painfully racist. Hurston uses a much more romantic kind of prose in her narration and the contrast is stark and sometimes confounding. The least charitable reading is that Hurston, as an educated black woman, wants to keep some distance from her characters. A more middle of the road reading is that she’s trying to capture the rhythms of the way her characters actually would speak. The most charitable, and I think correct, reading is that she wants to demonstrate that even people who can’t really articulate ideas in beautiful ways still have rich, beautiful inner lives. First and foremost, this book really is about Janie’s inner life and she’s a fascinating character, as are the men she encounters through her life. Joe, her second husband, is probably most interesting of the male characters; Tea Cake, her third lover, is really beloved, but he is perhaps written in too romanticized of a way, too much of a saint for his own good.
Still, even as the book is about Janie’s interior journey to selfhood, it’s also a book packed with incident, if not necessarily with plot. The book is in many ways about the difficulties of self-determination of any kind that these characters face. In a lot of ways, their lives are at the mercy of fate; they sort of wash up where life takes them and Janie’s plight is doubled in this manner: she’s not just poor and black, but she’s also a woman, so her helplessness in the flood of incidents that drive her life is even more pronounced than that of her male counterparts. This is most clearly expressed in a really terrifying hurricane sequence that is Hurston at her most visceral. Hurston’s prose really is wonderful and the book has a raw, natural earthy feeling to it. I was very surprised at how frankly the book discusses sexuality in particular; the very first time we see Janie in the book, Hurston spends a surprising amount of time describing her body and the way it moves and Janie’s inner life is very much a sexual one. And if it was shocking to see a black woman’s inner life given the value this book gives it in 1937, it must have been doubly shocking to see her given actual sexuality.
I think this book really deserves every accolade it’s gotten. It’s a book that I struggled with and a book I still have problems with; more accurately, maybe I should say I have questions about it. But the real power of the book is in just how profoundly moving it is. For whatever issues there might be with the book, the emotional impact is intense and it’s a book rich in themes and ideas as well. It’s certainly a masterpiece by any reasonable standard and it’s a book that holds up wonderfully. Even if you have substantial problems with the book, which I didn’t, it’s still absolutely essential in my opinion. It’s a book, at the end of the day, taken up with the souls of these characters and, by extension, the soul of America. By further extension, I suppose, the soul of all humanity. Hard to come up with higher praise than that. 4 stars.
tl;dr – classic deserves every accolade it’s ever gotten; an essential read packed with ideas and overwhelming emotion and wonderful characters. 4 stars.