One night, the narrator meets the handsome Hirsch Hess, a brooding Jew who seem sbent on self-destruction over his homosexualtiy. He begins to haunt the secret places where such men meet: a waterfront area known as The Battery and the Peacock Alley Bar. As they grow older, the narrator begins to distance himself from him, not liking the unusual attraction that Ned has for him he soon learns that he himself has such strange urgings. The young narrator meets Ned Grimke, a shy, club-footed boy, when just a child and begins an unusual friendship. In this novel, the unnamed narrator recounts the love triangle between himself and two other men in 1920's Charleston - a very repressive time when even a new dance was considered shocking enough to have people arrested. Harlan Greene’s prose is lyrically beautiful and elegantly evokes the splendor and decay of Charleston. Still, I am glad I read this novel and would willingly recommend it to someone looking for fiction about doomed love or a tale of the Old South. In the end, I think the pervading sense of hopelessness in the novel turned me off the most. Nonetheless, I find it difficult to empathize with people who seem bent on self-destruction and lash out at each other in often-cruel ways. Given the hostilely homophobic environment in which they live (Charleston in the 1920s) it is obvious why these men feel and behave as they do. Why We Danced the Charleston is peopled with characters whose repression makes them resentful, angry, frightened, and sadomasochistic to varying degrees. I often have a difficult time when reading books in which none of the characters are particularly likeable. This dislike is not the result of poor writing or any fault within the text itself, merely a disconnect with the characters and situations involved.
I picked up this book expecting to enjoy it, but, sadly, did not.
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