The Review of Contemporary Fiction

John Henry Days by Colson Whitehead
Keith Gessen

Colson Whitehead. John Henry Days. Doubleday, 2001. 389 pp. $24.95.

John Henry Days is a big, ambitious novel in the line of the big, ambitious novels of the past ten years. Its closest relative is clearly Don DeLillo’s Underworld—John Henry Days can be considered a shorter, sadder, and funnier version of Underworld, with the organizing theme of the atom bomb replaced by the legend of John Henry. Like Underworld, the book consists of a series of brilliant, intersecting set-pieces; it therefore suffers from the same dissipation of its energies, the sense that it can be spun, virtuosically, forever. John Henry Days is less arbitrary, however, both because Whitehead does not reach so far afield and because his method of composition seems more organic to the material. Arriving just after the battles for postmodern storytelling (and, simultaneously, Black Arts) have been fought, Whitehead can afford to be less insistent on significant connections and devote more energy to the development of character. The central beneficiary of this is J., a freelance journalist who forges for the book a wide inroad to the heart of the culture. Several of the resulting set pieces are tours de force, including a thirteen-page description of the Rolling Stones’ Altamont concert at which the Hell’s Angels stabbed to death a black concertgoer—“like the Crispus Attucks of the seventies.” More centrally, there are chapters about the historical John Henry; about the black historian Louis W. Chappell, who traveled to West Virginia in the 1920s to trace the John Henry legend; and about a man who sets up a heartbreakingly unfrequented John Henry museum in his Harlem apartment. In part because the big, funny postmodern novel is a priori a cosmopolitan form, unconducive in its playful contingency to the brooding, earth-and-blood introspection of high modernism, race, in this book, is important in a different from previous American fiction. Though Whitehead can inhabit anyone, and does so effortlessly, there is nothing soothingly “post”-racial about his work; rather, for his sophisticated African-American characters, racism is less about violent scars than about loneliness, less about a compelling burden than a nagging sense of guilt. This is, all told, an important book. [Keith Gessen]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction John Henry Days by Colson Whitehead Keith Gessen Colson Whitehead. John Henry Days. Doubleday, 2001. 389 pp. $24.95. John Henry Days is a big, ambitious novel in the line of the big, ambitious novels of the past ten years. Its closest relative is clearly Don DeLillo’s Underworld—John Henry Days can be considered a shorter, sadder, and funnier version of Underworld, with the organizing theme of the atom bomb replaced by the legend of John Henry. Like Underworld, the book consists of a series of brilliant, intersecting set-pieces; it therefore suffers from the same dissipation of its energies, the sense that it can be spun, virtuosically, forever. John Henry Days is less arbitrary, however, both because Whitehead does not reach so far afield and because his method of composition seems more organic to the material. Arriving just after the battles for postmodern storytelling (and, simultaneously, Black Arts) have been fought, Whitehead can afford to be less insistent on significant connections and devote more energy to the development of character. The central beneficiary of this is J., a freelance journalist who forges for the book a wide inroad to the heart of the culture. Several of the resulting set pieces are tours de force, including a thirteen-page description of the Rolling Stones’ Altamont concert at which the Hell’s Angels stabbed to death a black concertgoer—“like the Crispus Attucks of the seventies.” More centrally, there are chapters about the historical John Henry; about the black historian Louis W. Chappell, who traveled to West Virginia in the 1920s to trace the John Henry legend; and about a man who sets up a heartbreakingly unfrequented John Henry museum in his Harlem apartment. In part because the big, funny postmodern novel is a priori a cosmopolitan form, unconducive in its playful contingency to the brooding, earth-and-blood introspection of high modernism, race, in this book, is important in a different from previous American fiction. Though Whitehead can inhabit anyone, and does so effortlessly, there is nothing soothingly “post”-racial about his work; rather, for his sophisticated African-American characters, racism is less about violent scars than about loneliness, less about a compelling burden than a nagging sense of guilt. This is, all told, an important book. [Keith Gessen]

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