Their eyes were watching God

Greetings, fellow Frittatis. And welcome to the third episode of the Literati thread.

Last week’s subject of my literary focus was Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 Their eyes were watching God.
I chose this book because it is short (180 pages). I knew I was going to have little time to devote to reading on account of my foolish new venture into yet another commercial endeavor.This fevered chasing after gold and silver is brought about by my sincere desire to ward off the horrors of penury and to shower Lovely Lola in all the satin and silk her mellifluous self deserves.

Their eyes were watching God follows Janie, a light-skinned black woman living in Florida in the 1930s.
The central theme of the novel is the desire for love and happiness against the back-drop of quite adversarial circumstances (i.e. being a woman and being black in the American South in the Thirties.)

Plot (with spoilers)

Janie’s an orphan who’s raised by her grandmother who insists on marrying her off as soon as Janie’s hormones show the very first signs of stirring. She marries a peasant of a man who thinks of her as chattel, only fit for cooking and cleaning. She soon leaves this simple beast and goes off with a well-dressed, debonair looking fellow with whom she spends the next 20 years and the next 100 pages.
Although this man is an improvement over beau number one, this ambitious and (relatively) wealthy man sees Janie as a trophy, and unhappily Janie advances into middle age, until…..
Tea Cake makes his appearance; a sunny, honest and much younger man, who makes Janie experience love and life, even though he is an unsophisticated laborer who loves to gamble and carries with him a switch-blade in case his fellow dice-throwers decide to recoup their losses with the aid of a straight razor.

Evaluation

In the first review on this thread, I mentioned that I read the book (The Second Coming, by Walker Percy) incorrectly, because I took too long to read it, which diminishes the overall reading experience by messing up the pacing of the plot.
Perhaps there are different ways to read a novel incorrectly and perhaps that is why I can’t be enthusiastic about Their eyes were watching God.
Or maybe the experience is better if the reader is black or female, but I simply did not like this book.
Short as it was, halfway through the story I deliberated whether I should push through to the end or just abandon the book and pick up next week’s subject.
Most of the book is in dialogue, as in “Us colored folks is too envious of one ‘nother. Dat how come us don’t git no further than us do”, which makes the story quite lively, but Mrs. Hurston’s prose, while narrating the story, is far from excellent and sometimes just plain clunky.
Another problem with the book is that it feels as if the characters (mainly Janie and Tea Cake) are being marched through the story in order for the author to get her point across.
Although I sympathize with Janie, I never had the feeling I got to know her. For better writers, such as Mr. Bowles who wrote the subject of my previous entry The Sheltering Sky, this isn’t a problem, as they can draw a reader in by the sheer force of their descriptive powers and their cunning prose.
It sounds unkind, especially since the subject of this story is such an important one, but I just don’t think Mrs. Hurston is a good writer, and this story could have been much better.
If anyone has read the book and is in violent disagreement with my review, I would like to hear from you, because it always bugs me when a work of art is much praised and people rave about the wonders to be found in the work, while I am left with my snout in the dirt hunting for, but not finding, the coveted literary truffle.

Until then, Their eyes were watching God receives a meager 4 Winonas on the Irritati scale.

Until next week, and if you have been, please stop at once.