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Quicksand (Larsen novel)Quicksand is a novel by American author Nella Larsen, first published in 1928. This is her first novel and she completed the first draft quickly. The novel was out of print from the 1930s to the 1970s. Quicksand is a work that explores both cross-cultural and interracial themes. Larsen dedicated the novel to her husband.

Discussing the novel, Jacquelyn Y. McLendon called it the more "obviously autobiographical" of Larsen's two novels. Larsen called the emotional experiences of the novel "the awful truth" in a letter to her friend Carl van Vechten.

Plot
Nella Larsen introduces the educated mixed-race protagonist, Helga Crane who struggles to find her identity in a world of racialized crisis in the 1920s. The novel begins with Helga teaching at a southern black school in Naxos which is meant to be a fictional mirroring of the Tuskegee Institute. Helga is the Daughter of a Danish mother who died when she was an adolescent and West Indian father who is absent. Her early years were spent with her Danish mother and White step-father who loathed her and there began her torn relationship with her split identity. The novel gives us a glimpse into the dichotomy of being mixed raced and the divergence into two vastly different worlds as the protagonist travels through uniquely different cultural spaces from 1920�s Jazz Age Harlem to Copenhagen, Denmark.

In Naxos, where the novel begins Helga Crane is a teacher suffering from social angst as she is discontented with the social uplift philosophy delivered by a white preacher. The theme of mainstream white influence is developed throughout the novel, but makes it debut at the very beginning while she is in Naxos. She is repelled by the subjugate demeanor of her superiors with consideration to their attempts to white wash her black counterparts and she criticizes the Booker T. Washington inspired sermon that reinforces racial segregation and warns black students that striving for social equality will lead them to become avaricious. This incites her first endeavor of escapism where she quits her job and moves to Chicago. There, her white maternal uncle, now married to a bigoted woman, shuns her. The inimical encounter instigates her move to Harlem.

When in Harlem, Helga Crane becomes the secretary to a refined, but often hypocritical, black middle-class woman who is obsessed with the "race problem." She is then launched into her now third hankering to flee. Crane visits her maternal aunt in Copenhagen. Although she enjoys the lavishness of her new voyage, she is treated as a highly desirable racial exotic which forces her to return to New York City. Close to a mental breakdown, Crane happens onto a store-front revival and has a charismatic religious experience. After marrying the preacher who converted her, she moves with him to the rural Deep South. There she is disillusioned by the people's adherence to religion. In each of her moves, Crane fails to find fulfillment. She is looking for more than how to integrate her mixed ancestry. She expresses complex feelings about what she and her friends consider genetic differences between races.

Throughout the development of the novel, though driven by the search for racial identity, Helga also rejects intimate relationships with every man she encounters at each destination. It isn�t until she fully indulges in an intimate relationship that she becomes forced to exist in a space (Deep South) and becomes stuck.

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