October 2023: Colson Whitehead

Our October author is Colson Whitehead (1969-). An American novelist (with 9 novels so far) who had won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction twice (in 2017 for The Underground Railroad and in 2020 for The Nickel Boys - his 6th and 7th respectively), he had also published a handful of short stories, a few essays and non-fiction books.

He is a new author for me (despite having at least 3 of his books at home...). What do you plan to read? What had you read by him?

My plan is to read The Underground Railroad, but I won't get to it until November.

>1 AnnieMod: Both The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys are on my WL and my library has both. Depends on which one I can get first in October!

ETA: I just received The Nickel Boys for 21 days!

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead was only 221 pages in length, so I finished early. Whitehead won a Pulitzer Prize for this book in 2020 and I expected much. I was slightly disappointed. Nickel Boys is the fictional account of a 1960's boys reformatory school in Florida. It is based on a true story, the Dozier School for Boys. I have no qualms with the writing and mechanics, they were all good. However, the story seemed very generic. I know that I have read something like this before, but I can't put my finger on it. The story was predictable and safe. I was left wanting. The subject matter is worthy, but the characters and their plight were distant. Sadly, I have read better. I wanted this story to jar and shake me, but it didn't. I really did love the protagonist as he tried to live by Dr. King's precepts.

another author Ive been wanting to read think underground railroae looks the most interesting

My copy of Underground railroad has gone AWOL, I'll have to return to this author later.

oh this one slipped from my memory, need to get on that!

I have finished The Underground Railroad. This novel won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2017 and other awards. Set at an unspecified time in the mid 19th century, it tells the story of Cora, a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia, her escape, and various actual and near recaptures, through the seemingly more enlightened South Carolina, the murderous North Carolina (where "the negro race did not exist except at the ends of ropes"), devastated Tennessee, freedom for a while in Indiana, and then final freedom at an unspecified place in the North. It is of necessity a grim and gritty story, with horrors aplenty in all these locations. The one issue I have with this is the fantasy element - the underground railroad here is a literal, physical railway underground, not a figuratively named network of escape routes. I do not understand why the author made the decision to depict it in this way. It is unnecessary and not only adds nothing to the narrative, indeed in my view it detracts from it, as it may lead some readers to wonder, what else about the events depicted may not be real? I just feel that this detracts somewhat from the historical horrors the author rightly lays bare.

>8 john257hopper: I agree, John! Too many people, both children and adults already believe it is a literal, physical, escape route beneath the ground; and some a real working railroad beneath the ground.

My copy of The Underground Railroad has finally turned up and I hope to read it this month. I'll keep your comments in mind, Tess and John!

>8 john257hopper: That was exactly my reaction: if the railroad isn't real, what else here is fake? I appreciate how the author keeps the description of the atrocities to a minimum and lets the readers visualise them in their imagination, which makes them so much more vivid (at least for me).
This has taken me out of my comfort zone, and for that I am grateful.

Vote on next quarter's authors: https://www.librarything.com/topic/354843#8271360

I think it is important to counter any suggestion, as per the new history curriculum in Florida, that slavery was a system which was mutually beneficial to slaveowners and the enslaved. This was the narrative put forward by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in the 20s and 30s which lay behind their campaigns for the erection of monuments to Confederate generals. The Underground Railroad certainly lends it no support. I am concerned, however, that by concentrating on sadistic, sexually deviant slaveholders and patrollers whose obsession with capturing and torturing runaway slaves goes far beyond any practical utility Whitehead distracts us from the fundamental moral wrong of one human being owning another, with all the right to use and/or dispose of him or her that would obtain with any other piece of property. This is wrong, full stop, even if the owner is kind and caring. The only example of this in the novel is the previous owner of Caesar’s family who treated her slaves well and meant to free them when she died but didn’t get around to making a will. Otherwise the slaveholders are monsters. That is doubtless not realistic and not why slavery had to be abolished. It’s not a “realistic” novel, I concede, but I don’t think this aspect of the Magic Realism structure supports the anti-slavery argument strongly enough.

>11 MissWatson: “The author keeps the description of atrocities to a minimum”?! A man is castrated and has his genitals sewn into his mouth before he is burned alive. Families gather for weekly mass lynchings. A slave-catcher wears a necklace of human ears. Etc. I’d hate to see the book you found graphic.

>14 booksaplenty1949: The first on your list is a horrific and sadistic act. That is not the same as graphic. Graphic is about description and depiction, about images. A graphic novel is a story told in images. Graphic violence is violence described or shown in elaborate, realistic detail: a page-long torture scene, the opening moments of Spielberg’s “Band of Brothers”, Tarantino slicing off limbs and heads in slow-motion.
That is not what Whitehead does in his book. As I recall the scene, he states what has been done, not how. The how and its images are supplied by the reader’s imagination, making them complicit. Readers can easily skip a detailed graphic description, they cannot run from images conjured by their own brain. They have to confront what the author makes them see and think about it.

>15 MissWatson: Since we are talking about books rather than movies the distinction between description and depiction is not clear-cut. In the final analysis the reader must supply *all* the images from his or her imagination.