Though "Seraph on the Suwanee" is the love story of a daughter of Florida Crackers and of a scion of plantation owners, it is no peasant-marries-the prince tale. Arvay Henson, true Cracker in breeding, is above her caste in temperament; James Kenneth Meserve is plain Jim who speaks the dialect and who has turned his back on family, with its static living in the past, to become foreman in a west Florida turpentine camp. Neither is it a romance of the boy-meets-girl school. Beginning conventionally enough with a seduction (a last minute one when Arvay is in her wedding dress), it ends twenty-odd years later when the protagonists are about to be grandparents. In this denouement the divergent lines of Miss Hurston's astonishing, bewildering talent meet to give us a reconciliation scene between a middle-aged man and a middle-aged woman that is erotically exciting and a description of the technique of shrimping that is meticulously exact. Emotional, expository; meandering, unified; naive, sophisticated; sympathetic, caustic; comic, tragic; lewd, chaste—one could go on indefinitely reiterating this novel's contradictions and still end helplessly with the adjective unique.

Incompatible strains in the novel mirror the complexity of the author. Miss Hurston shuttles between the sexes, the professions, and the races as if she were man and woman, scientist and creative writer, white and Negro. She is at her best as a man among men objectively portraying Jim and his work-a-day life with such verisimilitude that we never doubt "whatever God neglected, Jim Meserve took care of." A fight in a bar complete with appropriate obscenity, a struggle between a man and a diamondback, between a pilot and the sea, are her meat, and, in the speech of her characters, she do know how to cook it….

With Arvay and domestic routine Miss Hurston is less successful, holding her guilt-ridden seraph too consistently in the cloudy sky of the emotions. She knows every intimate detail of Arvay's physical self and reveals it to the point of absurdity, but she has to construct a visible Freudian fretwork to give us understanding of her psychic self. On the other hand, only a woman could animate the adolescent and adult Arvay, now going her wishy-washy unhappy way, now facing facts and courageously burning her past when she burns her house….

The generic life of the Florida Cracker from the cradle to the grave is so documentary in the dramatization of mores and language it seems incredible that one not born to the breed, even though a neighbor and an anthropologist, could be its biographer. Miss Hurston knows her Florida Negro as she knows her Florida white and characterizes them with the same acumen, but she gives them no more attention than the plot demands. In Jim's relation with the colored workmen whose know-how has helped him get rich, in Arvay's petulant jealousy of them, in her triumph over her past when she sits at the table with Titty-Nipple and Cup-Cake, the old southern adage that the aristocrat is the darky's best friend is symbolically italicized….

Reading this astonishing novel, you wish that Miss Hurston had used the scissors and smoothed the seams. Having read it, you would like to be able to remember every extraneous incident and every picturesque metaphor.