It’s the mid-1960s, but in the rural Southern setting of this novel, the remnants of slavery are still evident; the aging white landowners occupy the plantation house, while the ten or fifteen black families live down in the old quarters. Racial issues come to the fore, but are anything but cut and dried, when a Creole man is killed in the quarters. When the sheriff shows up, he finds a young white woman and several old black men with shotguns all claiming responsibility for the death. Each chapter is narrated by a different character, from the small boy tasked with gathering the shotgun men to the white woman’s journalist fiance, to various ones of the old men (shades of Faulkner). All of this should make for an extremely compelling book; let’s say that it is compelling, but I wish (and my classmates did, too) that Gaines had carried out the sense of race and color variations that began the book out through the end–by the end it turned into much more of a black vs. white battle. The fact that the murdered man is Creole is fascinating; he’s treated as white, but there’s clearly a huge class and culture difference between the Creole community and the older white community. Unfortunately, these issues are not explored as well as they could be. Still, there’s a lot going on here, and the style is definitely evocative.
Above Average

I enjoyed this much-maligned last novel by Hurston best of all. In a turn that many critics have denounced, she sets this one among white people and focuses much more on the marriage relationship than on racism, or self-actualization, or any of the things that preoccupied her in her other novels. However, in that close focus on that one marriage and the people who have to overcome inferiority complexes, patriarchal structures, and debilitating lack of communication, she really captivated me. If you haven’t read Hurston and want to, I actually recommend starting with this one instead of Their Eyes. It’ll get you into her style of looking at things without the difficult of the dialect, for one thing. But then, I’m also biased, because I really loved it.
Well Above Average

Or, Exodus According to Zora Neale Hurston. Thing number one: Hurston was a religious skeptic. Thing number two: Hurston was an anthropologist, especially interested in folk culture (all folk cultures). Thing number three: Hurston liked to deal with racism and slavery obliquely. Thing number four: She hoped that Moses, Man of the Mountain would be her masterpiece. It didn’t turn out quite so well as she’d hoped, but you can definitely see all these things in it. Moses in her story is probably Egyptian rather than Hebrew, but that’s left ambiguous; however, he is definitely a magician, almost in a voodoo sense. He may or may not have really heard the voice of God on Mount Sinai–the important thing is that he convinced the people of Israel that he did. The fascinating thing about the book is how closely she does stick with the events of the Biblical narrative, but manipulates the motivations or just enough of the minor details to give it a wholly different spin.
Well Above Average

Computer expert Catherine is hired to go to Morocco to work for OPEC (it’s set in the early 1970s); little does she know that her presence there has actually been orchestrated as part of a huge, on-going game of chess that has been going on since the reign of Charlemagne – a game in which the players are seeking a chess service made for Charlemagne that contains a secret too powerful to let it fall into the wrong hands. In a parallel story, two nuns try to keep the service safe during the French Revolution, ending up intimately involved in the political intrigue of the time. The story is reminiscent of The Da Vinci Code (which is name-checked on the cover of the newest edition), but it’s actually, I don’t know, well-written and, I don’t know, historically pretty accurate. It changes a couple of French Revolution events in order to involve our nuns, but nothing serious. I had great fun actually recognizing all the people the book mentions from my European Romanticism class! :) The secret the service is hiding is a bit of a letdown after all the conniving that went on to get it, but the ride to get there was so much fun that I’m not complaining.
Well Above Average

“Passing” refers to a member of one race successfully pretending to be of a different race. Claire is a very light-skinned woman with black ancestry who passes as white to the extent of marrying a white bigot and he never knows the difference. Her childhood friend Irene is too dark to physically pass, but the title is ironic, because Irene is an upper-class African American–of the class and temperament to imitate whites in terms of societal structures. Meanwhile, Claire tends more and more throughout the book to want to revert to her African American upbringing–so is it really Claire or Irene who is “passing”? The idea of there being a black societal hierarchy that is separate but parallel to white society is also found in Jessie’ Fauset’s There is Confusion; I hadn’t really thought of this existing before, so seeing more of its intricacies was interesting. Plus, both Irene and Claire were intriguing characters. A small, slight book, but insightful and engaging.
Above Average

Helga leaves the black school where she teaches because the administration doesn’t put any value on being African American, but tries to emulate white culture as much as possible. Her subsequent travels take her to Chicago, New York, and even Denmark for a while (her mother was Danish), and then back to the deep south. There are some interesting bits, especially in the differences between being black in America and being black in Europe, but the ending depressed me so much I was looking for the nearest bridge to jump off.
Below AverageQu

Jessie Fauset was one of the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance, her home being a major meeting-place for the African American writers and artists of the 1920s…sort of like the 19th century Parisian salons. She also wrote a novel or two, including this one. It’s really interesting for its insight into an upper-middle-class black family in New York City in the 1920s, a side of the culture you don’t often see. It basically posits a societal order among black families that’s separate from but equivalent to white families. The one thing I really liked about it was that it focused more on interpersonal relations than race relations – race was in there, of course, but Fauset was under no delusions that solving the race problem would solve every problem facing her characters, because the socio-economic and personal conflicts would still be there. That said, There is Confusion is a fairly routine book. It was a fast, fairly enjoyable read, but it wasn’t anything terribly special.
Average

This is not, despite the title, an autobiography. It is fiction. Interestingly, Johnson originally published it in 1912 anonymously, leading many people to think it was an actual autobiography of a biracial man passing as white. It’s still powerful, though, even when you know it’s not true–in fact, it adds a level of irony and self-referentiality that’s really cool. The man is “ex-colored” because he’s light enough to pass for white–in fact, he didn’t know himself that he and his mother were black until he was like, seven. His life takes him from Georgia as a little boy, to Connecticut, Harlem, Europe, the deep south, and eventually back to New York, and allows him to compare the treatment of the race question in all those places and among all classes of people. (Honestly, the range of his experiences should be enough to show the book is fiction…then again, Langston Hughes had similarly far-reaching experiences…) It’s a well-done book, and though it seems really simple, actually has many different layers to it, depending on how you choose to read it.
Well Above Average