This is my first Colson Whitehead book and I liked it quite a bit. It is a patchwork novel, narrating characters and events from a range of times and places in American history: late 19th century as well as early, mid, and late 20th century - not in that order! These narratives loop backward and forward round one another, but not to the point of incoherence. Several of the set pieces are just exquisite, some of the best stuff I've ever read. By far the most gripping for me was a (fictional) eyewitness account of the 1969 Rolling Stones/Hell's Angels debacle in the desert. It is horrifically fascinating (and told in the dazzlingly authentic voice of an old white rock journalist). If it surprises you that such an account would find itself in the midst of a novel ostensibly about the legend of John Henry and the history of the railroads of America, then it gives you an indication of the unexpected turns this novel takes. You will indeed encounter very richly rendered passages on John Henry himself working away at his legendary steel-driving as a member of the work crews making railroad tunnels through America's mountains. You will also see 'temp' workers in an office helping create search engine content for the very latest (1996) in internet technology. You'll be a hack journalist in a convenience store queue in the middle of the night with junkies in modern (1990s) Brooklyn one chapter, a 1950s blues singer on the make in Chicago in another, a middle class ten-year-old black girl in late 1940s Harlem in yet another, and have a modern press pass to a phantasmagoric-dystopic book launch in still another. There are one or two moments of suspense or violence, a few moments of eeriness or horror, lots of chuckles and some outright laughs. There are tons of wry observations and insights about the contemporary grotesque-yet-bland circus of pop culture and media and technology. (Wonderful refrains are scattered throughout about the 'plodding obeisance of pop', 'He had been devoured by pop', 'deep into cold pop', 'life under pop', etc.) There is poignancy and there is dystopia. It is about ecology as much as culture. Indeed, you could perhaps call it the story of 'Pop vs. The Mountain'.(I know you will be few, but if any of you are R. A. Lafferty fans like I am, you'll perhaps be as surprised and delighted as I was to find some very interesting resonances between the two otherwise disparate authors.)The book suffers from its form. It is hard to be impelled by any one narrative thread. There is a (shiftless but very likeable) main character and his is the main story of the novel, but he can be off stage for long swathes of narration. At times the pages fly by but at others they grind to a halt. There is always some reward in moving forward, some new set piece you wouldn't have guessed and for which you are very glad you kept going. But it is a long, sprawling, high-minded 'great American novel' (if bitingly ironic in its high-mindedness).The latent (and sometimes blatant) prejudice toward many white and 'country' people from an NYC perspective was off-putting at times, if understandable. But there was, at least, an honesty to the narrative that often admitted it was big city paranoia toward the rest of the country. (A neglected theme that could use its own novel-length treatments.)It is also a very philosophically bleak novel. There are certain versions of this kind of bleakness that for some reason I can totally take to (e.g. Cormac McCarthy), but in this novel I found it bordering on depressing for me personally. It is mostly quite deeply cynical. (Not in the sense of having no sympathy for characters, but rather in the sense of seeming to 'see through' just about *everything*, bordering on nihilism. Some, I know, find such a worldview bracing. I find it untrue.) Still, I can relate to the novel's world-weary vision. Considering its pessimism, it is actually remarkable that it stays true to the instinctual yearning to find a scrap of meaning or value or goodness, mostly failing but maybe showing a glimmer of hope in the end. It is a search for authenticity in a world of slick, sick fakery and I salute the author for turning away in disgust from so much of contemporary American culture.I am definitely very excited to go on to read the rest of Colson Whitehead's novels.
John Henry Days is a complex, sophisticated, heartbreaking and funny novel that explores themes of endurance, change through technology, and the meaning and implications of shared stories. We’ve all heard the story of John Henry, the steel driving man in West Virginia who challenged a steam drill, won and perished a hero immediately afterwards. Here the story is resurrected by placing it at the center of a present-day inaugural John Henry Days celebration in a town that is right next to the town where John Henry supposedly worked. You get the idea—the ownership of the story shifts depending on who tells it.The story is told by a grand cast of characters, current day and historical, including John Henry himself, J. (could his name be John?), a journalist going for a new record for uninterrupted all-expenses paid journalistic jaunts courtesy of being on “The List,” Pamela, the daughter of a Harlem hardware store owner who amassed a John Henry memorabilia collection being sought for the new local museum, and Alphonse Miggs, a stamp collector who goes postal. Together the stories create a coherent, multifaceted whole that features intersections of characters in the past and present (Alphonse saves J.’s life by giving him the Heimlich maneuver to dislodge a piece of free prime rib; we meet J.’s mother as a daughter of Harlem’s Striver’s Row, ditching her proper piece of recital music for a bluesy rendition of John Henry). The John Henry story means different things to different people—a perceptive interpretation of one of our neglected national stories.Even though there is vast cast of characters, the novel focuses on the story of J. and Pamela, two young people struggling to make meaning of their lives. J. is a talented and cynical journalist covering the celebrations, and Pamela struggles with resolving the story of her father’s John Henry collection—something she has hated, resented, and been ashamed of for years. One of the highlights of the novel is the crowd scene at the fair—don’t miss it. Whitehead is supremely talented at describing the power of a crowd. (And if you liked that scene you will love his zombie masterpiece Zone One, which is a massive, magnificent crowd scene like no other).If you’re looking for some contemporary literary fiction that explores American themes stop right here and read this.
What do You think about John Henry Days (2002)?
Yuck. For the first few pages I was really into it, but it only got worse: Such sophomoric writing, such smarminess, such creakily obvious narrative set-up, such transparent literary tricks to glorify a bunch of soulless characters about whom I couldn't give less of a damn. It read like a second-rate indie movie and made me hate the author behind that awful voice, and I gave up after seventy pages.Is the rest of this book like this? Is most of Whitehead's work? I haven't read anything else of his.
—sam
John Henry Days is written in an interesting narrative style. It shows us events through the lens of multiple characters, some repeatedly visited, others glimpsed just once or twice. A man named J. Sutter is the one most frequently observed, so I suppose he is technically the main character. But the true MC is a particular weekend in a particular town where an event possibly took place many years earlier, featuring a person who possibly existed. The event was a man defeating a machine at the feat of drilling a tunnel through mountain to allow the continuation of train tracks. The man of course, is John Henry. He is the stuff of legend regardless of whether he was ever one of flesh and blood, so a stamp has been created to commemorate him and a festival is taking place to mark the occasion. Colson Whitehead approaches this weekend from a wide variety of angles. Among the people involved in the build-up is a man researching the origins of a song written about John Henry, a man who collects railroad stamps, a woman who owns a hotel in the town where the festival is taking place, a man so obsessed with John Henry that he turned his home into a museum dedicated to him, that man's daughter, a journalist covering the events of the weekend, and John Henry himself. Hints are given throughout the book that just as the famous race ended in foretold tragedy, so will the commemoration. Whitehead has a beautiful way with words. If you're looking for a character driven novel where you'll deeply identify with and care for the protagonist, look elsewhere. If you're looking for a traditional beginning, middle, end style story rather than one which jumps back and forth in time and place, go find another book. But if you're interested in a distinctive approach to examination of a symbolic event, one that will be timely so long as people either resist, embrace, take advantage of, or become victims to the changes brought about by the march of progress, then I point you in the direction of John Henry Days. John took a last stand for human determination before it was replaced by mindless but more efficient machinery. Win or lose, his effort was in vain. He may as well have been battling death. We can postpone arrival of the Grim Reaper, but inevitably his date of arrival will be reached.
—Roy
I am befuddled by these reviews. I have tried to read The Intuitionist 4 times; APEX is a riff on all the good in John Henry Days; Sag Harbor worked better as a short story. But John Henry Days? This is about my 11th time reading it, this time in prep for teaching it again for the first time in almost 10 years. I'm basing the star rating (really a 3 1/2) on this read of it, which for me has lost a little of the magic since a) I know what's going to happen and b) I've poured over every line a 1000 times. But don't be mistaken: the last few chapters are emotional gold. The entirety of the book, conceptually and structurally, is freaking genius. This is most assuredly a novel about character, characters in the literary vein of Ahab, obsessed beyond the brink: with stamps, with memory, with ghosts, with stories, with notoriety. And that transcends history, it transcends the narrative threads in the novel, it transcends human experience. But there is also the structure of the novel, which is explained in the prologue: all story is composed of multiple stories of individuals. Subjectivity is a bitch, and it can be tedious to sift through the multiple narrative threads of real life. And oh, look, the book is structured in the EXACT same way! What is contemporary folklore and mythology? How has it transformed since 2001 (or 1996 in the timeline of the novel)? It would be interesting to see where J. is at today. In terms of tone, what everyone is dismissing as Whitehead being ever-clever here is really very simple: there is a racial tet-a-tet in the South that must be rendered in irony so that one doesn't just give up altogether. To dismiss the humor as too smart means there are some really stupid readers reading this book.I want my authors to challenge me to the edge, like the characters in this novel get pushed to the edge. How else does one work through the mental/ historical chains to self-actualization?
—Craig
