Their Eyes Were Watching God

⚖The case for it

Janie watches a pear tree in bloom and decides what she wants love to feel like, and readers keep returning to that page. What surrounds it is the Eatonville porch, men trading stories and insults outside Joe Starks's store, written with an ear so exact reviewers describe eavesdropping rather than reading. Hurston runs two registers at once, a formal narrating voice against thick vernacular dialogue, and one reader calls the result "shimmering, feathery-fine, poetic prose." Then the hurricane hits the Everglades muck farms and the book changes gears entirely. Published in 1937, it reads as "a feminist novel ahead of its time," and some rank it "superior to Wright's Native Son."

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

The dialect is spelled phonetically throughout, and readers report sounding words out syllable by syllable: "too many sound-it-out words," until "my eyes were aching" and "the dialogue's so grating to read." Between the porch scenes the book meanders, "lacking a conventional plot and resolution" for readers who want a build. The men's storytelling sequences read as transcribed stage business rather than novel. Janie's most sympathetic partner still hits her, and the book files that under acceptable. And the sharpest charge came from Hurston's own contemporaries, Wright and Ellison among them, who called the comic dialect "a blight of calculated burlesque," a book "not addressed to the Negro, but to a white audience."

— the honest librarian

5h

honest hours

7

sittings