Love Quote by Stanley Crouch

Crouch is staking out a challenge to a literary market that too often treated Black fiction as sociology first, interior life second. His “almost any black novels” is deliberately needling: not a denial of Black literary richness, but a jab at the narrow set of stories publishers, reviewers, and even readers routinely elevated as representative. He’s pointing to an expectation that Black characters must be legible through pathology, trauma, or instructive struggle, while romantic complexity gets reserved for everyone else.

The specificity of “extremely intelligent and talented” matters. Crouch isn’t simply asking for “positive” representation; he’s insisting that brilliance doesn’t inoculate you against intimacy. That cuts against a tidy narrative where accomplishment equals transcendence, where the successful Black couple becomes an emblem of arrival. His subtext is more abrasive: if two people “understood a lot of things,” why can’t they “get it together”? Because knowledge doesn’t metabolize into emotional fluency. Because pride, competition, historical pressure, and self-mythology can turn love into a courtroom.

“As still at odds” does the real work. It frames conflict not as lack (ignorance, immaturity) but as a byproduct of equals colliding, each with a fully stocked inner world. Coming from Crouch, a critic who fought against what he saw as sentimental or programmatic cultural scripts, the intent is clear: write Black characters with the same permission to be messy, demanding, and unresolvable that canonized literary lovers have always had. The provocation is aesthetic and political at once: complexity as a refusal to perform.