A review by laura_sackton
Quicksand by Nella Larsen

I'm thinking about what it means for a book to be queer. The protagonist of this incredible novel, Helga, is trying to find another way to be. She goes from place to place, sure of herself but unsure of the world, and it’s partly because of her biracial identity, which the world does not like or understand, and it’s also because she doesn’t have any models. She leaves a school she's teaching at because she can’t stand it. She goes to NYC but doesn’t feel at home in Harlem. She goes to Europe and looks for herself there, searching for something different. There is nothing explicitly queer about this book, except for everything. 

The plot is heartbreaking.

Upon returning from Europe, Helga discovers a woman she was close with, whom she had an intense and sometimes antagonistic relationship with, is getting married to her old boss and someone she respects. She has a brief affair with him, realizes she can’t have him, and then has this fit of sudden religion, gets married to a pastor, moves to the South, has kids, and makes herself small. It's so devastating. She’s been striving for so long, trying to build something new without a model, looking for a way to live that isn’t marriage, and suddenly she can’t anymore, she just can't keep trying, and that's where the book ends. She's married, she’s been sick, she wants to leave her situation but she hasn’t figured out how. The book ends with her recovering from sickness and dreaming of finding the freedom she's been looking for her whole life. But not yet, she tells herself, she's not ready. Later. Later, she'll go.

It’s so heartbreaking and so real and so much of it, to me, has to do with trying to fit yourself into boxes that aren’t made for you, and how hard it is do this alone when you aren’t even sure what the freedom you are imagining looks like. For Helga there are so many boxes: she doesn’t want to work in one of the few jobs that is available to her. She doesn’t want to get married. She wants to live a good life, for herself. What does that look like? In so many ways her life is a queer life.

This book reminded me quite a bit of Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid. One thing that is so amazing to me about what Larson does is that she's not really writing about Helga trying to "find herself." Helga knows who she is and what she wants. She is direct, strong, has clear opinions, isn’t taking shit from anyone–and this doesn’t make her happy. It's the world. The world is the problem. There's this amazing tension between her sureness and the world’s blurriness that reminds me of Kincaid–how sometimes the battles feel internal but they are really external.

This is a beautiful, tragic, breathtaking novel about how the world wears people down—Black people, queer people, women. It's about how you can only go on striving for so long. In the context of queerness, to me it feels like this heartbreaking but beautiful explanation of why people assimilate, why people give in to the allure of comfort. Because if you look and look and look and you still can’t find the new thing, how do you build your own way out? Sometimes you can’t.