Everybody knew nigg*rs didn't have birthdays. *Carmen sips coffee* OK, let's do this thing! Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Yes. I've been putting off reading this for a very long time now. Really dreading it, for a plethora of reasons. Pulitzer novels make me wary, for one thing. For another thing, I'm not into rape/torture/rape/death/rape/torture/mutilation books, and this seemed like it was going to fall into this category. Thirdly, I'm always highly skeptical when men write women as MCs and win huge awards for it. Skeptical. SKEPTICAL. Cora is a slave in Georgia. The book is about her life on the plantation, her subsequent escape through the underground railroad, and her journey. Her journey toward what? I have no f*cking idea. Let's break this down. There are good things and bad things I have to say about this book. *sips coffee* WHAT COLSON WHITEHEAD DOES WELL Let's start off with the positive. Hmmmmmm, there's so much good here it's hard for me to know where to start. ONE: Whitehead is actual a pretty decent writer. And by 'pretty decent writer,' I mean the way he strings words together is effective and can be stunning. This doesn't mean I'm saying he's good at plotting or other aspects of writing which we will definitely be critiquing heavily in the What Colson Whitehead does poorly section of this review. *sips coffee* But the way he actually crafts sentences and paragraphs is powerful. Let's take a look: The white men were silent. As if they'd given up or decided that a small freedom was the worst punishment of all, presenting the bounty of true freedom into painful relief. Whitehead drops true statements and observations about the world. He really captures the essence of things, sometimes: No chains fastened Cora's misfortunes to her character or actions. Her skin was black and this was how the world treated black people. No more, no less. And he made me laugh, only once. This is a pretty dark book. At least in Virginia, lynch mobs maintained a pretext of spontaneity. They didn't string up people practically on your front lawn, the same time every week, like church. This here is an example of not only great writing, but something believable and true: She had never seen colored men hold guns. The image shocked her, a new idea too big to fit into her mind.
...
She thought of the picking, how it raced down the furrows at harvest, the African bodies working as one, as fast as their strength permitted. The vast fields burst with hundreds of thousands of white bolls, strung like stars in the sky on the clearest of clear nights. When the slaves had finished, they had stripped the fields of their color. It was a magnificent operation, from seed to bale, but not one of them could be prideful of their labor. It had been stolen from them. Bled from them. The tunnel, the tracks, the desperate souls who found salvation in the coordination of its stations and timetables - this was a marvel to be proud of. She wondered if those who had built this thing had received their proper reward.
...
The slave catcher had little choice but to call upon the man after midnight. He daintily sewed their hoods from white sacks of flour but could barely move his fingers after their visit - his fists swelled for two days from beating the man's face in. He permitted his men to dishonor the man's wife in ways he never let them use a nigg*r gal. For years after whenever Ridgeway saw a bonfire, the smell reminded him of the sweet smoke of Carter's house going up and a figment of a smile settled on his mouth.
...
Stolen bodies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood. With the surgeries that Dr. Stevens described, Cora thought, the whites had begun stealing futures in earnest. Cut you open and rip them out, dripping. Because that's what you do when you take away someone's babies - steal their future. Torture them as much as you can when they are on this earth, then take away the hope that one day their people will have it better.
...
Carpenter snarled when he said the word, a mangy dog hoarding his bone: nigg*r. Stevens never used the word. He disapproved of racial prejudice. Indeed, an uneducated Irishman like Carpenter, steered by society to a life of rummaging graves, had more in common with a negro than a white doctor. He wouldn't say that aloud, of course. Sometimes Stevens wondered if his views weren't quaint, given the temper of the modern world. The other students uttered the most horrible things about the colored population of Boston, about their smell, their intellectual deficiencies, their primitive drives. Yet when his classmates put their blades to a colored cadaver, they did more for the cause of colored advancement than the most high-minded abolitionist. In death the negro became a human being. Only then was he the white man's equal.
I wish there had been more of this kind of stuff in the book, instead, Whitehead is prone to bombastic passages on philosophy. I liked more practical revelations, like when Cora regrets not having sex with her beau:
Why had she put ----- off for so long? She thought they had time enough. Another thing that might have been, snipped at the roots as if by one of Dr. Stevens's surgical blades. She let the farm convince her the world is other than what it will always be. He must have known she loved him even if she hadn't told him. He had to.
TWO: Whitehead is not a skeeze or a pervert. I am so relieved. In a book that is obviously going to have a truck-load of rape in it, I really appreciated that he didn't go into graphic detail about sexual stuff, whether it was rape or consensual. This goes triple since he is a man writing a woman MC. I have to give him major props here. Not because he wrote a believable female character (he didn't) but because he didn't give into the impulse a lot of authors have to make it 'gritty' by describing rape in detail or, conversely, f*cking it up because he wants to delve deeply into explicit consensual sex scenes in which he will say something ludicrous that will jolt me out of the story when I'm reminded he's a man attempting to write a female character.
I never forgot he was a man, he failed to craft a realistic female MC IMO, but at least he didn't f*ck up the sex or embarrass himself with the rape scenes.
THREE: It is SO important to learn about slavery in the U.S. of A. No matter the color of your skin, your ethnicity, your background or your nationality. I really think it is important. Just like I encourage Americans to study huge events and atrocities that take place in other parts of the world (that often they are not even aware of), I also encourage non-Americans to study slavery and modern-day racism in the U.S. of A.
Whitehead has poured 16 years of hard research into this book, and it shows. I think we need more hardhitting novels about slavery. Whitehead is actually providing a huge service here. I can see this book being taught in schools, and it should be. He really immerses you in this time period and he doesn't shy away from the horrors and realities of slavery.
As hard as it is to read - and it is very brutal - I think it is very important to know what people do to each other. After all, slaves still exist, it's just that slavery is underground now, but I think it's important to understand how human beings treat each other and what kind of despair and inhumanity can be spawned by taking away human rights from someone.
This is coming from someone who usually is unable to read a book containing rape.
Whitehead's brilliance is in making the book brutal and horrifying, but staying away from sentiment or maudlin handwringing. His ruthless matter-of-factness only elevates the novel to a better plane of existence in this case.
Whitehead is warning us not to get soft. This is valid and meaningful. In a world where people no longer think vaccines or water treatment is necessary and people deny the Holocaust, we are at a time in history when books like this are more important than ever.
THREE: Whitehead seems to have a natural talent for writing horror. If you like horror novels, you may enjoy this book. And no, I'm not talking about the horrors of slavery, I'm talking about straight-up horror writing in the vein of King, Grey, Malfi or Hill. I mean, he's no Stephen King, but he does have a talent for horror-writing IMO.
FOUR: The book is engaging and moves at a fast clip.
FIVE: This isn't about black people vs. white people. Whitehead may be reductionist, but he actually covers this fairly well. Slave women are gangraped by male slaves. And they are raped by white men. White people murder and torture black people. White people sometimes help black people and lose their lives for it. Sometimes black people help other black people. Sometimes, black people betray and murder other black people. Even though this book is SO MUCH about race and race relations, AND Whitehead tends to simplify in a lot of ways, one way he does not simplify is by making some kind of statement that all white people are x or all black people are y - beyond the obvious horrifying results of slavery and institutionalized, systemic racism.
I know what you are thinking. Well, what about Latino people and Asian people? Well, there are no Latino or Asian people in this universe! 🙃
THINGS COLSON WHITEHEAD DOES POORLY
The book has major flaws.
ONE: Cora has no personality.
Not only does Cora have no personality, but neither does any other character in the whole entire book.
Whitehead seems incapable of crafting characters. The people in this novel are soulless husks that are merely used by Whitehead as mouthpieces to pontificate his views, ideas, philosophies, and theories on racism and man's inhumanity to man.
I'm not exaggerating: neither Cora nor any character in this book has any traits, characteristics, or personality of any kind.
TWO: Not only do the characters have no personality, but they only commit actions. No one has any feelings or emotions. No one acts in a human way - not Cora, not any of the other slaves, not any of the white characters. There's no heart or human emotion in this book at all.
You might react to the suffering and cruelty, there is plenty of horrifying suffering and cruelty here, but no human emotions or thoughts to back it up. On the side of both 'good' and 'evil,' no emotions or motivations. These people might as well be Martians for how well they represent human beings. Whether the most horrible, abusive, rapist piece of sh*t or the most spat-upon broken slave or the most saintly abolitionist, not a single one of these creations of Whitehead's has a shred of actual human breath in them. Complete failure.
Because of these two points, if you are looking for a character-driven book, or a novel in the sense that it is a NOVEL, you will be very disappointed here. Whitehead fails to capture the human essence that is so vital in novels.
THREE: Whitehead tends to dream up concepts, tell you about them, and then tell you about them. And then tell you about them. And then tell you about them again. And you're like, "I get it. I got it the first four times. Thanks." He just can't let things naturally break upon you, he has to hammer sh*t in. It's heavy-handed, repetitive, and unnecessary.
FOUR: Some of the book just doesn't make ANY sense, and I'm not talking about the magical realism. This ties in with Whitehead's inability to craft human, feeling, breathing characters. Cora acts in a way that ONLY serves Whitehead. She has no personality or traits. She is brave when he wants her to be brave, cowardly when it serves him, brash when it serves him, shy when it serves him. She does whatever Whitehead needs her to do in a scene, she has no character or personality which can lead the reader to get a sense of who she is or why she does what she does.
This often leads to scenes where you are like, "What the f*ck is she saying that for?" "Why is she suddenly doing x? That is incredibly stupid." But she's simply doing and saying those things to spout / illustrate Whitehead's philosophies and dogma.
The 'characters' are merely scarecrows that Whitehead animates in order to illustrate his concepts. So oftentimes they do stuff that in actuality makes zero sense.
FIVE: Whitehead tends to really simplify things and boil them down to their most basic concepts. In a way this is necessary - otherwise the book could easily be 1,000 pages - but sometimes I was annoyed by how broad a brush Whitehead was using to paint groups of people. No one was nuanced or had layers. Everyone was simplistic and had the most basic of attributes that were never fully explored or explained.
Again, Whitehead does this to illustrate his core ideas and to pit caricatures against one another. It's very reductionist and can get annoying. In this town, everyone is a rapist and murderer. In this town, every single person is a pious Christian. In this town, absolutely every white person agrees that all black people should be hanged. In this town, every white person has sympathy towards the plight of escaped slaves. It's like, no, Whitehead, people themselves as individuals are complicated and communities are as well, on a different scale. Please illustrate this. But no, he insists on boiling everything down to its simplest form.
I get it - he's doing a take on Gulliver's Travels, and he spells this out for us, but it is still rather annoying to this reader. Take the book as an allegory, you'll be a lot happier than I was.
SIX: Sometimes, you are just like, "What the f*ck, Whitehead?"
"I have black skin, but I don't have a tail. As far as I know - I never thought to look," Cora said. "Slavery is a curse, though, that much is true." Slavery is a sin when whites were put to the yoke, but not the African. All men are created equal, unless we decide you are not a man.
Is she... is this supposed to be a joke? She's in a serious conversation with a woman who has no sense of humor, and Cora's certainly never displayed any humor, so I read this as serious. o.O Which makes me question what on earth Whitehead is doing.
The interplay between Ridgeway and Cora is like this, as well. You are reading their 'conversations' and 'banter' and you are just like o.O No way would this ever take place, which brings me back to Whitehead using his characters as soulless tools to illustrate concepts rather than human beings.
For instance, on page 221, when Whitehead suddenly tries to convince me that , which comes out of f*cking nowhere, and goes on and on about survival and Manifest Destiny etc. etc. The very idea of Cora and Ridgeway sitting down to soup and discussing intellectual ideas about humanity's existence and it's morals is COMPLETELY LUDICROUS and just one example of how Whitehead isn't really crafting a story here, but instead educating and preaching.
SEVEN: Whitehead jumps all over the place. I was able to follow the timeline MOST of the time, but I know a lot of people got lost reading this. He doesn't introduce flashbacks, and sometimes he ends a scene and then jumps forward suddenly into a different time and place. It's annoying.
EIGHT: Sometimes Colson Whitehead will mention someone like, "She couldn't believe he'd said that about Steven." and I'm like, "Who the f*ck is Steven?" And then I'll have to flip back six pages to where 'Steven' is mentioned and try to figure out who he is and how he fits into all this. This happened two or three times and it should have happened zero times.
NINE: There's no real ending or point to this book. I closed the book baffled, wondering what the hell had just happened. I was also very unsatisfied. This is NOT because I was seeking a happy ending to the book. It could have had a sad ending, or any ending, or even a f*cking point.
Whitehead does not have a point, story arc, or ability in this novel to carry you from point A to point B. It's frustrating.
TL;DR I suppose if you read this as an allegory or a fable you might enjoy this more. Perhaps if you take it as symbolism, it not only makes more sense but won't anger you with it's complete lack of plot and character development.
This is a thoughtful, powerful, heavily researched book that can teach us a lot about racism and humanity.
But as a novel it is a failure. Despite Whitehead's obvious talent and writing ability, he completely fails at things like character, personality, nuance, and subtlety.
If you are looking for a CHARACTER-DRIVEN NOVEL with a STORY ARC and a plot, this is not going to please you.
However, Whitehead does have some illuminating things to say about race, racism, and how completely terrible human beings are. I'm not even being sarcastic, the book violently wakes you up and reminds you of all the suffering that has gone on in the world and is still going on today. It makes you take a good, hard look at yourself and reassess who you are in this life and who you want to be. I'm not talking (solely) about racism here, I'm talking about all the f*cked-up things that are going on in the world right now. It's shocking to remember how cruel and soulless people can be to other people.
If you are looking for Pulitzer-Prize worthy writing... well, I don't see the problem here. Whitehead can write, although he does tend to repeat himself and go off on rants about certain subjects.
I'm going to have to give this five stars with the warning that it is FAR from perfect, has lots of flaws, and isn't going on my favorites shelf.
Like The Goldfinch and All the Light We Cannot See - two other Pulitzer Prize winning books - The Underground Railroad is well-written but deeply flawed. Like The Goldfinch and All the Light We Cannot See, I am giving this five stars, but it is not perfect. NOT PERFECT. And not on my favorites shelf. Deeply flawed. But with enough redeeming value that I can't hold back a five-star rating.
An example of another author trying to do this exact thing and failing horribly would be The Patience Stone, which is like the one-star version of this novel. o.O So, Whitehead could have done a lot worse. Keep that in mind.
Read at your own risk.
In effect, they abolished slavery. On the contrary, Oney Garrison said in response. We abolished nigg*rs.
