The Frame

The first of four novels Zora Neale Hurston wrote, and my least favorite of the four. Hurston had sort of a strained relationship with her African-American contemporaries. She was a very good and fairly popular writer among whites as well as blacks, but she was also an anthropologist and a proponent of Negro folk culture, and her use of dialect caused a large faction of progressive African-Americans to turn against her, believing she perpetuated negative stereotypes. Like, for example, the main character in Jonah’s Gourd Vine, who becomes an important man in his community through his skills at preaching (Hurston saw preaching as a form of art–she didn’t have much use for religion, outside of the use she could make for it for her writing, which was considerable), but is felled by his promiscuity. It feels like the first novel that it is – not quite ready for prime-time, and the ending feels like she wasn’t quite sure how to end it.
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