Customer Reviews

John Henry Days

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This intriguing book succeeded in capturing my imagination, but wasn't the type of book I could really savor. Whitehead has reached far and wide, deconstructing a number of accounts to create a montage, or a stamp collection if you will, of John Henry Days. The premise was simple enough. A rat pack of free-lance writers covering the inaugural day celebration of the newest commemorative stamp issued by the post office. One black reporter stood out like a sore thumb, and we are reminded a little too much of this. A few other blacks were sprinkled into this tale set in a remote West Virginia town which still eats Wonder bread. Fortunately, Whitehead didn't stick to convenient racial stereotypes. Instead, he used this town to represent Middle America, which J had to navigate if he was going to come out with a story, and keep his "streak" alive.

The best scenes in my mind were those that played with the John Henry theme more closely. The others seemed to be flights of fancy. Inticing sometimes, but straying wide of the mark on other occasions. Whitehead seemed to have taken Ellison's "Invisible Man" from his underground chamber and brought him to light in a comtemporary setting. John Henry Days seemed like the perfect foil, but Whitehead didn't go very far beyond character sketches. This novel read like a reporter's notebook, a novel in progress, not a full length work of fiction. As such, it left me a little disappointed.

I approached John Henry Days with some trepidation. I enjoyed Whitehead's first novel, The Intuitionist, and thought it could harken the arrival of a strong and enduring literary career. Second novels are challenging, both for the author and for the reader. The author is challenged to live up to the promise of his/her first work. The reader is challenged by virtue of his/her own heightened expectation and anticipation that the second work will outstrip the qualities of the first novel. Whitehead has met his challenge with ease. John Henry Days stands on its own as a great and compelling read. The book also met this reader's challenge. John Henry Days exceeded my heightened expectations. The book's 'big picture' involves the ongoing, primordial struggle between humanity and technology. The big picture is presented through the prism of John Henry's 19th century battle against the soulldless steam drill and J. Sutter's inner struggle to survive in the souless world of frelance, junketeering oriented writing in the 21st century. The book is layered and textured through time. The juxtaposition, in the hands of Whitehead works exceedingly well. His writing and prose style is superb. There were some pargraphs that I read two or three times in order to savor better their flavor. Well done Colson.

Whitehead is a writer who obviously finds enormous joy in writing, and it's such fun to participate in that joy with him! Ebullient and absolutely irrepressible, he recreates the ambience of a West Virginia county fair being held in 1996 to celebrate the issuance of a new stamp honoring John Henry, the legendary black miner who beat the steam drill, then collapsed and died. Talcott and Hinton, twin towns in rural West Virginia, are hoping the publicity and their enthusiastic efforts to promote John Henry will generate tourism to help their depressed economy.

But this is not a traditional novel, and we find out in the first twenty pages that a catastrophic killing spree occurs during the festivities, probably ending those hopes. In just a few more pages, we also know who the shooter is, and there are still more than 300 pages to go! Filling these pages are a cast of characters ranging from John Henry himself to his modern alterego, J. Sutter, a "junketeer"/freelance writer covering John Henry Days, along with postal employees, representatives of publicity firms, collectors of memorabilia, researchers into John Henry's life, songwriters, stamp collectors, and local "experts" and politicians. These provide Whitehead with innumerable venues for gentle satire, moments of warmth and sensitivity, and a serious exploration of themes.

More a meditation on race, the growth of legends, the role of the press, and the lure of dreams than a narrative, the novel is almost plotless, yet I found it an absolute delight to read, a book hard to put down, filled with moving and eloquent scenes that echo long after the book is finished. This is largely due to Whitehead's humor and his obvious goal of entertaining his readers, despite his weighty themes. His remarkably gentle treatment of racial issues, in particular, allows him to explore this terrible legacy from the days of John Henry to the present without losing his equanimity (and, perhaps, some of his readers), and leads the reader to draw conclusions of his own, an ultimately more powerful and longer lasting experience. This is a warm and witty novel "with the sincerity of a summer day" and a great deal of wisdom. Mary Whipple

John Henry Days has received so much attention lately (loved by the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, as examples), so much so that I had to run right out and buy the hardcover. Does the novel live up to the hype. Yes, yes, definitely yes. There is so much to rave about in this novel. Whitehead writes like a dream. Each sentence is a work of art, and those sentences add up to a great story filled with uniquely believable characters, witty dialog and observations and an interesting story. J. Sutter is a journalist, a junketeer, taking up every invitation he receives to attend a free conference to cover whatever needs coverage. This time, it is John Henry Days, the celebration of a new postage stamp, in a West Virginia town where John Henry's legend is said to originate. The world and his job are beating J. down, just as John Henry's world and his job beat him down. But this time, it's not as obvious as grueling physical labor, instead it's the day to day grind of the junketeer's life. Whereas John Henry's world was obviously killing him, J.'s world is much more subtle. But J. has hope, whereas, we'll never know whether the legendary John Henry did. The novel juxtaposes tragedy with humor, bittersweet sadness with hopeful optimism. It embraces much of what it is to be American, as seen from J.'s perspective. All in all, a well told tale with much to recommend.

They say laughter can extend your lifetime, if so, I'm going to live a long, long time as I laughed aloud over and over again when reading this book. Colson Whitehead has the sharpest sense of humour, and a knack for making perfect, sharp observations about people - their physial tics, their dress, their pretensions, their fears, their ambitions, their uncertainties. The journalists, Tiny and One Eye, were excrutiatingly funny, I reread some of the scenes in which they appeared, just to be sure I didn't miss a single barb. Whitehead knows how to convey something else rather piercingly too - loneliness. Pamela Street, a woman trying to decide what to do with the strange inheritance her father burdened her with (John Henry memorabilia, gathered obssessively, touchingly), reminded me of Lila Mae, the strong minded but deeply solitary woman in Whitehead's first book (called The Intuitionist, another stunning novel). And these are just a few of the secondary characters, I haven't even begun to describe the main guys, J. Sutter and the mythical (?) John Henry. And I'm not going to, this is a book that you just have to read for yourself, enjoy for yourself. And if you're anything like me, laugh while you're doing it.

This is the real thing. The voice is authentic and the story is genuinely moving. The last centruy, complete with all the great movements of race and progress, technology and art are fashioned into something very close to poetry. Here is, I think, the grand scope of Thomas Wolfe writing without the illusions that were shattered by the last century. This original story will be on everyone's must read this summer. My strongest recommendation.

Whitehead has done it again-using the idea of man vs. machine as a backdrop as in "The Intuitionist", he's created a memorable story that you can't stop thinking about long after you've read the last page. The basic story revolves around J.Sutter, a mooching freelance writer who travels to Talcott ,West Virginia for the unveiling of a commemorative John Henry stamp. His motive for the trip starts out to be the free food and fare, but he gets much more that that as the story unfolds. Intertwined in J's weekend adventure are stories of others with John Henry connections-a Black academic trying to chronicle Henry's life, a blues musician who recorded the ballad of John Henry, Paul Robeson who did a play on John Henry's life, and the daughter of an obsessed man who started a John Henry museum in Harlem. John Henry foklore completes the mosaic. It may sound complicated but actually it's quite enjoyable reading -causing you to laugh out loud one minute and be seriously pensive the next. I still have a few loose ends to clear up on my second read-looking forward to it.

Fans of Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist know that Whitehead is just one great writer. In John Henry Days we follow multiple narratives, all equally accomplished, all related to an obscure celebration of an event that may or may not have occured -- John Henry's contest with a steam drill. The quality of the mythical invading the everyday world is well done, but most admirable is Whitehead's perfect sense of the directions and proportions of American popular culture. Whether describing an ordinary country fair in awesome detail or retelling the story of the Stones at Altamont, Whitehead doesn't just have his finger on the pulse of American life, he's already got the heartbeat figured out and a crash cart ready, if need should arise. John Henry Days reminds me a lot of Brauner's Love Songs of the Tone-Deaf -- both are very funny novels that act as manuals to American life and perhaps its future. Top recommendation for this outstanding work!!

"John Henry Days" apparently means to be yet another entry into the Great American Novel Sweepstakes. And yet, it's not so much a novel as a series of set-pieces on American popular culture that intermingles imagined scenes from the life of the legendary steel-driving man, the obsessions of collectors, and scenes from late-20th-century pop culture (the novel is set in July 1996 at a "John Henry Days" festival in West VA--and not so coincidentally at the moment when the dotcom startups were begining to start up). The modern sequences feature a black freelance journalist, J. Sutter, who wants to set a record for junketeering while denying to his writer pals that this is what he is doing.

Colson Whitehead, who apparently knows the junketeering life well, performs dazzlingly. There are sequences that will make you want to put down the book and applaud his wordsmithery. Most of the jazz-riff-like setpieces are brilliant (the one in which receipt-collecting, free-riding Sutter remotely dials up his answer-machine messages from his WVA model is a standalone masterpiece) although Mr. Sutter's editor probably should have urged him to lose the wife of the hotel owner who sees ghosts and the interminable county fair scenes that tell us nothing new about county fairs. But you can skim through those quickly and painlessly and go on to the next riff, which you're odds-on to enjoy immensely.

There's a big "but," though: when you reach the final pages, maybe you'll feel that something is missing. Mr. Whitehead's technique is dazzling, alright, but he seems not to have much of an idea of overall form or any sort of pacing. Everything comes at you in the same way and at the same speed. It's like watching the act of a juggler who is an expert at keeping all the clubs in the air, but has no idea how to build the act to some kind of grand finale; and so instead at the end he simply plucks all of his clubs out of the air one by one, takes his bow, and leaves the stage.

Having read and loved Whitehead's first novel, I was waiting for his follow up with high hopes. All my expectations were met and surpassed by this extraordinary novel. John Henry Days is wideranging in its themes, characters, styles, you name it, clever as hell and ALWAYS funny. The journalist J., and the steel driving John Henry, couldn't be more different, yet Whitehead connects them in unexpected, thoughtful and often moving ways. I was mesmerised by this book, and there were some sections that, in the beauty and precision of their observation, could be read aloud as poetry. Now I can't wait to read his next book.