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jordannchloee's review
dark
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
1.25
this book, written by a white man in the 20th century, is what you should expect of a white man in the 20th century. for that i am unsurprised. it is deeply racist in its portrayals and unconcerned with the truth of the people it seeks to represent. it pits the female characters against one another and ensures the continue and perpetual violence of the female protagonist Bess, who ends the story kidnapped with no one seemingly having tried to help her? it marks the black community as inherently tragic. porgy, our disabled protagonist, is the frequent subject of ridicule because of his disability and also ends in tragedy, having been incarcerated and murdered a man for his woman only to not have her any more. suffice to say that porgy by dubose hayward fails in many significant ways. it was only okay in its marking of community as central (and even then the community wasn’t truly communal — they gave up on one another so frequently). i would go as far as to say it was never really okay. i’m going with like 1.75 stars and probably actually it’s lower than that. it is a racist book by a racist man who likely stole a lot of his literary work from his racist wife.
lauli's review
4.0
I came across this novel writing a paper on "Porgy and Bess", the opera based on it. Since I'd never heard it mentioned when I studied American literature, I wasn't expecting much, but was pleasantly surprised. The novel is gripping, the writing is very poetic and effective when it comes to describing the most dramatic, and the characters are well-rounded and human. Heyward truly deserves more credit than he's been given as a writer, especially for a very honest portrayal of the black community in Charleston, with its wonderful capacity for compassion, and its bonds of self-protection, as well as destructive features such as violence and gambling. His attempt to reproduce BEV is also praise-worthy.
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