Nella Larsen's Passing

I’ll just say it: Nella Larsen’s Passing is the best book we’ve read all semester. I was not prepared to admit this when starting the book, in fact, I wasn’t expecting to enjoy the novel at all. What makes Passing so great is the mere fact that it is so ahead of its time. According to the back of the book, Passing was published in 1929, and yet it shares its pacing and tight narrative with much later contemporary novels. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

First, the concept is great. It’s so much deeper and more complex than anything within the Harlem Renaissance Reader. The very concept of “passing” is absolutely fascinating from every perspective imaginable. Clare, for instance, is a black woman who has married a racist and betrayed her entire ancestry. Conversely, there’s John, who has been raised to hate black people and yet has married one without his knowledge (oh, sweet irony!). Irene is equally compelling, bound to some unexplained duty to Clare without truly understanding herself. I could go on and on, but I’ve made my point. The characters are great. George Babbit is nothing but a caricature next to these people. Anthony Patch’s struggle with Gloria and money seems trivial and, frankly, just plain boring.

What’s even better than the characters is the pacing of the novel itself. There is no fluff here. Babbit and The Beautiful and Damned were plagued with so much unnecessary narrative that reading them felt like running track in an ankle-deep marsh. There was so much back and forth in terms of characterization that it was impossible to believe by the end that any of the changes within the characters would actually stick. Don’t get me wrong, the length of both novels did contribute to their “epic” feel, but was everything within them absolutely necessary? Not at all. With Passing, everything is necessary and there is no redundancy in the narrative. I know this doesn’t seem like that big of a deal, but it makes the prose so much tighter and provocative.

Not only does the pacing cut out the fat, Passing also manages to provide the reader with all of the information and imagery necessary to easily follow the plot. One of my biggest complaints of Cane stemmed from one of the characteristic of the whole “modernist” style, namely the omission of certain parts of the text. Jean Toomer seemed to think that this would force the reader to pay closer attention and engage more with the text. While reading through these omitted sections, I did not engage any more than I normally would have, but I was more frustrated than I’d been in a long time. I won’t use this blog to rail against such strange and illogical methods (that could be a whole blog of its own), but needless to say there is none of that in Passing. While Larsen avoids using superfluous information, she provides the reader with all the details necessary to know what’s happening within the story without bashing them over the head with it. Case in point, the whole concept of “passing.” I’m sure many in the time the book was published knew what “passing” was, but I sure didn’t. Larsen makes sure to let the reader know (even uninformed ones like myself) exactly what they need to know to understand through character dialogue rather than a simple paragraph saying “This is what ‘passing’ is…” It's this sort of hand-holding that pulls a reader out of a novel and can insult their intelligence. Larsen, thankfully, avoids this.

Another aspect of the novel's pacing that was brought up in class on Tuesday is the structure of the narrative itself. Both Fitzgerald and Lewis tell their stories in a strictly chronological sense, exacerbating the plodding pace issue discussed above. Larsen does not restrict herself in the same way, rather using a flashback in the beginning to hook the reader before diving into the present narrative. Granted, the "hook" is very short and the story probably could have been told chronologically without hurting too much, but the mere fact that the flashback is there opens the story up in ways that confining it to a chronological retelling never could. Breaking up the flow of time in this way is just something you don't see enough from early 20th century texts, and it again forces Larsen's Passing into the limelight.

I fear I’m getting off track here, but my point remains the same: what make Passing so great are the complex characters and especially the near perfect pacing. It’s a testament to the book that I finished in two days what I’d originally planned to split into four. I just could not put the book down, and that’s saying something considering that this is required reading.

I think what impresses me the most about Passing is how those two points I’ve just discussed in length are so modern feeling, like a book I’d pick up in the new releases at Barnes and Noble. F. Scott Fitzgerald is a literary legend, but that does not at all mean his work reads as well as it did when it was first released. Literature has inevitably evolved since the 1920s, and yet Larsen’s Passing seems to pass off as one of the new generation. That in itself is worth commendation, and I for one am more than excited to finish the final part of the book for Thursday’s class.