A Ballad for All Times
John Henry Days brilliantly
contrasts the rhythms of a grassroots legend and modern-day
hype
By PAUL GRAY
Having
won admiring reviews for his first novel, The Intuitionist
(1999), Colson Whitehead must now face the higher hurdle of
a literary career: a second novel, which, unlike its predecessor,
will confront enhanced expectations and thus the possibility
of falling short. If this prospect ever intimidated Whitehead,
no hint of nervousness appears in his rousing John Henry Days
(Fourth Estate; 389 pages). In fact, one of the novel's many
characters muses on a hypothetical "second novel, recapitulating
some of the first's themes, somehow lacking" because the similarly
hypothetical author "tries to tackle too much." As it happens,
there is some recapitulation in Whitehead's second novel-race
in America, the trials of assimilation facing aspiring blacks-but
only a coolly confident writer would dangle such alluring
bait before potential reviewers. Whitehead won't get a bite
here.
John Henry Days indeed tackles a great amount of material but without any signs of overreaching or strain. The novel ripples outward from a central event: a three-day festival in Talcott, West Virginia, commemorating the legendary black railroad worker who outhammered a steam drill but died in victory. Many of the ballads about John Henry place the epic battle he waged with the machine in nearby Big Bend Tunnel, and Talcott residents hope that John Henry Days will become an annual and tourist-friendly attraction.
Advising them, for a fee, is a canny Manhattan p.r. mogul named Lucien Joyce, who lures some journalists to the event with the usual promises of complimentary travel, lodgings, food and booze. One of these veteran junketeers is J. Sutter, an African-American freelancer who has been covering, on someone else's tab, staged events every day for three months. Why not, he asks himself, just keep going until he breaks the freeloading record, whatever that is?
In the meantime, Sutter must endure and write up this Talcott festival for his Internet employer of the moment: "A bloodless edit will follow ... and one day an electronic burp with his byline will float up into the Web morass, a little bubble of content he will never see."
An early flash-forward in the novel reveals that the Talcott weekend celebrations will end in an act of violence. But this seed of suspense never really sprouts into page-turning anticipation. John Henry Days evolves in a circular, not a forward, momentum. The contemporary, confected media hype is contrasted, implicitly, throughout the book with the older, mysterious, grassroots spread of the tale of John Henry, who may have died in the early 1870s but who is as impossible to identify historically as Odysseus or Robin Hood. As one character notes, "The Ballad of John Henry has picked up freight from every work camp, wharf and saloon in this land; its route is wherever men work and live, and now its cars brim with what the men have hoisted aboard, their passions and dreams."
All of Whitehead's main characters, starting but by no means ending with Sutter, are so hip and ironic and jaded that they can't imagine-indeed, they would be embarrassed by and scornful of-the meaning of the novel they inhabit. John Henry Days is a narrative tour de force that astonishes on almost every page, but it generates more glitter and brilliance than warmth.
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August 13, 2001 | No.
32
COVER
STORY
The
New Kennedys
They're back. Four members of the clan are running for office in the U.S.
Five others floated trial balloons, then popped them. When the family
business beckons today, the name cuts both ways. A third generation struggles
with the legacy of Camelot
TRAVELERS
ADVISORY...
PACIFIC
BEAT: Cook Islands dynamo; M.P.s in grass skirts...
SOCIETY
AND SCIENCE
DOGS:
Best in Show... Are canine beauty contests a health hazard?
THE
ARTS
FASHION:
Celebrating Antwerp's radical style
BOOKS: A look at race in John Henry Days
CINEMA: Planet of the Apes? Rent the
original
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