In her third novel, African-American anthropologist and writer Hurston takes on the Biblical story of Moses and she gives it the epic treatment. This book is basically as long as her first two novels put together and it’s a real slog. I’m usually down for literary treatments of Bible stories and I was looking forward to what Hurston might bring to this. And she does bring a few things. She ties some folk magic, always a presence in her books, into the story of Moses, though she doesn’t replace God entirely with it. She also has the characters talk in a very colloquial fashion. She doesn’t use dialect as she has in her previous book, but this kind of makes the colloquial dialogue clunk even more than it might have if she’d just gone all the way and sort of made this a retelling entirely populated by African-Americans. As it is, it falls somewhere in the middle and it just really doesn’t work. As far as the plot goes, she allows herself to get stuck in some pretty annoying repetitive loops. The story in the Bible is repetitive as well, but because it’s moving quickly, it doesn’t really feel long when it goes through all of the ten plagues, for instance, because it knocks them all out on just a couple of pages. In this book, there are lengthy conversations around all of them and when you’re taking four or five pages to a plague and just having the same conversations about each of them, well, things get pretty dull. There are some nice passages scattered here and there and I get what Hurston was going for by trying to tie the narrative of the Exodus to the African-American slave experience, but she could have cut a solid hundred pages out of this book without skipping a beat and maybe more than that. The fact is that this story is so mythic and such a part of our collective consciousness that she could have treated it in a less detailed way and we would have still been able to hook up to the emotion of the characters. As it is, this one is a decidedly disappointing misfire in Hurston’s bibliography. 1 ½ stars.
tl;dr – disappointing retelling of the Biblical story of Moses is far too long, low-energy and pretty clunky; an unfortunate misstep for Hurston. 1 ½ stars.