Bill's Reviews > Quicksand

Author Nella Larsen was born in 1891 in Chicago to a white Danish mother and a black father, lived in Copenhagen with her mother and an aunt for a few years as a child, graduated from Fisk University in Nashville, and worked at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Helga Crane, main character in Larsen's debut novel, shares a fictionalized version of this background and we meet her as she decides she's going to return to Chicago because she doesn't fit in Alabama. This begins a quest to find somewhere in the world where she feels she belongs, that takes her to Harlem, back to Copenhagen, and finally, back to Alabama. Larsen masterfully portrays interactions that leave biracial Helga feeling alienated from Blacks as well as whites, and explores her revulsion with Black's embrace of Christianity, among many other topics. For a novel with so much interior dialog and consideration of race, Larsen is often surprisingly sensuous in descriptions of color, clothing, and emotions. Recommended.