Quicksand

Quicksand / Nella Larsen
NY: Penguin, 2022, c1928.
192 p. 

I read Larsen's Passing a couple of years ago and thought it was very good; the ending was unexpected and the story has stuck with me. I finally picked up Quicksand, and found it quite a different book - a little more focused on the interior life of its main character, Helga Crane, and told quite straightforwardly in style. 

Helga has a white, Danish mother (now dead) and her father, a black man, left them when Helga was young. This sense of otherness, of not belonging in either white or black society, shapes Helga's life and the many choices she makes in her restless search for a place to belong. 

We first meet Helga as a teacher in a Black school in the South, as she's deciding to resign, feeling stifled by the school's focus on attaining white standards for their students. She can't stand the hypocrisy of the school so heads back to Chicago where she is from, but there her white uncle doesn't want her - his new wife doesn't want Helga associated with the family. Helga finds it next to impossible to find work as an educated black woman; she could work as a domestic if she had references though. Finding a role as a rich woman's assistant, she ends up going to New York, drawn in by the lure of Harlem's dazzling society. But even there she eventually finds that her white side creates issues of not belonging. She's given a potential change when she's invited to live with her Danish Aunt Karin, who says she's always wanted Helga. Denmark is a dream, for a while; she's feted, treated like a celebrity, attracts notable figures, even one who wants to marry her. But she realizes that she is an oddity, an outsider, in Denmark and will never really belong even if she can exist freely there. And she suddenly misses America a lot, and the man she left behind as well. 

But like most of Helga's decisions, it's the wrong one at the wrong time, and the man she left behind has quite happily taken up with a friend of hers - they are getting married. In Helga's distress, she wanders the streets and has a religious epiphany at a storefront church. I have to say I did not see this one coming. This leads to her final choice, one she can't escape.

I must say that this read was depressing. Helga can't seem to find happiness, in fact her attempts all seem to sour and turn out in the worst possible way. There is the fact of her being someone living between two worlds, not really fitting into either one fully, and all the difficulties that causes for her both practically and emotionally. And the fact that she's an educated woman, and there isn't much place for her in that role either. She can't seem to find a way to compromise and find a way to create a space for herself if things aren't perfect; one hint of hypocrisy or any less than ideal options and she's off again. 

I felt for Helga, and thought her circumstances in the end were sad, but made sense in light of her character and how she had reacted to everything previously. Although she had many opportunities she could have taken advantage of, she turned away from so much, and only got what was left over, in the end. I tried to like Helga, and to understand her, but she's quite a prickly character and we don't get a lot of introspection in the writing, mostly just her frustrations and feelings in one moment before she leaps on to the next. I thought this was an important read, and one with a lot of potential for a lively discussion. But, I found Passing a bit more memorable and thrilling to read.