The beauty of Cane is that it's rough, uneven, improvisational

Only 6 of us present, but a great discussion last night in book group on Jean Toomer's "Cane." All agreed that the writing was beautiful and the book a bit rough, unpolished - in part because Toomer was a young author (late 20s), in part because he was an ambitious author, trying his hand in many forms and genres, in part because he was writing about material not readily part of the literary landscape - who had written seriously about black villages in Southern Georgia? - and in part because, though you might think from the outset that Cane is a report on southern life from the inside, in fact he was writing about material largely unfamiliar to him: he was an outsider, a visitor, almost like an anthropologist. That's the importance of the 2nd two sections of Cane: we see from them the Toomer, through his various fictional alter egos (Paul, Kabnis, in particular) was someone always on the boundaries and never quite finding his place in any culture, black or white, north or south, working class or high culture. The roughness of the book may be a flaw - some of the stories clearly are weaker than others and could not be published separately - but also its strength, as it gives the book an open, improvisational feeling - and as I noted the whole is more than the sum of its parts, like a great early-20th century painting - a bunch of lines, slash marks, dabs of paint, when seen at a distance or as a whole, creates an astonishing portrait or landscape. As Margot noted, Toomer is the "son" of Woolf and Joyce, and it's really a shame that his literary output was so small, but at least there's this strange book.