false <![CDATA[John Henry Days]]> 16276 10 Colson Whitehead's second novel posits a folk antihero for the information age: junketeer and puff-piece-writing man J. Sutter. For his latest assignment, this freelance hack is sent to Talcott, West Virginia, to cover its John Henry Days festival and the unveiling of the United States Postal Service's John Henry stamp. Sutter hasn't devoted much thought to American mythology lately, or to the epic struggle of man vs. machine, or to anything else besides padding his expense account and cadging free drinks. Still, our hero is engaged in a private contest of his own--a kind of junket jag, in which he plans to attend a public relations event every single day. Alas, this journalistic obstacle course threatens to eradicate Sutter's soul, just as the folkloric steam shovel eradicated John Henry's body. Whitehead cuts back and forth between eras and exploits. And what begins as a media-saturated satire soon turns into a jazzy, expansive meditation on man, machine, nature, race, history, myth, and pop culture--in short, on America, as expressed through the story of (who else?) a former slave.<p> Following on the heels of Whitehead's widely praised debut, <I>The Intuitionist</I>, <I>John Henry Days</I> won't disappoint anyone who delighted in the first book's wonderfully quirky writing or its complex allegories of race. The historical set pieces here dazzle, and the author casts a withering eye on our media-driven culture: "Since the days of Gutenberg, an ambient hype wafted the world, throbbing and palpitating. From time to time, some of that material cooled, forming bodies of dense publicity." Still, these brilliant parts don't necessarily add up to a satisfying whole. Whitehead writes the kind of smart, allusive, highly wrought prose that is impressive sentence by sentence. Over the course of 400 pages, though, it can be somewhat daunting. It's a bit like eating a meal in which each of the seven courses comes topped with hollandaise sauce. Worse, some of the characters' motivations remain abstract, as if the author hovered so far above his creations that their foibles struck him as simple absurdities. In a novel of this caliber, of course, much can be forgiven. But one is eager to see Whitehead quit riffing and make an emotional investment in his characters. The result will be fiction that engages the heart as well as the head. <I>--Mary Park</I> 1293126 book 2001 John Henry Days total:417|5:88|4:156|3:121|2:39|1:13| 417 1518 664 42 4 2 false false Fri Feb 27 15:05:21 -0800 2009 Sun Mar 08 06:20:56 -0700 2009 Apex Hides the Hurt" were so brilliant that most novels are weaker than them. "John Henry" also suffers from sophomore over-reaching; Whiteh...more...]]> 4 0 false false Sun Oct 11 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Sun Oct 11 18:18:13 -0700 2009 Sun Oct 11 18:18:19 -0700 2009
Popular Narcissism:
The miles retreat. Lawrence says it's not that much farther, and Lucien thinks, all these trees are for me. To delight his eye. He wonders if the natural drift of his thoughts makes him a narcissist, but then reassures himself that he is only substitu...
more...]]> 1 1 false false Fri Dec 07 10:21:39 -0800 2007 Fri Dec 07 10:22:09 -0800 2007 4 1 false false Sun Mar 08 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Mon Dec 08 10:45:30 -0800 2008 Wed Mar 11 10:02:19 -0700 2009 more...]]> 4 0 false false Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 2004 Wed Jan 09 17:49:40 -0800 2008 Wed Jan 09 17:50:57 -0800 2008 more...]]> 4 0 false false Thu Jun 01 00:00:00 -0700 2006 Fri Aug 31 19:58:37 -0700 2007 Fri Aug 31 20:03:05 -0700 2007
Narrated By: Peter Jay Fernandez

J. Sutter is a bonafide junketeer--a freelance writer, travelling from city to city, hungry for free meals and the discarded sales receipts of others to claim on his expense account. Travelling into the ...more...]]> 1 0 false false Mon Dec 15 00:00:00 -0800 2003 Mon Aug 10 07:39:14 -0700 2009 Mon Aug 10 07:39:47 -0700 2009 more...]]> 4 0 false false Mon Nov 24 21:08:33 -0800 2008 Mon Nov 24 21:11:30 -0800 2008 more...]]> 0 0 false false Wed Mar 11 11:59:45 -0700 2009 Wed Mar 11 12:01:03 -0700 2009
A recent review of his newest in Esquire (with a tagline about how this guy just HAS to be read), put him back on my radar ...more...]]> 1 0 false false Sat Jun 01 00:00:00 -0700 2002 Sun Feb 03 10:46:09 -0800 2008 Thu Feb 07 14:43:59 -0800 2008 more...]]> 1 0 false false Sun Aug 23 09:39:13 -0700 2009 Sun Aug 23 09:44:33 -0700 2009 5 0 false false Fri May 01 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Thu May 28 09:42:59 -0700 2009 Thu May 28 09:45:06 -0700 2009 3 0 false false Tue May 05 21:08:09 -0700 2009 Tue May 05 21:14:32 -0700 2009 3 0 false false Thu Feb 05 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Sun Sep 23 06:24:16 -0700 2007 Tue Jun 30 20:41:29 -0700 2009 John Henry Days is more expansive and more diffuse than the other Whitehead novels I've read (The Intuitionist and Apex Hides the Hurt), each of which focuses on a single character -- indeed a single character solving or resolving a mystery, although not always one they're aware of in the begi...more...]]> 5 0 false false Mon Jun 01 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Wed Sep 02 16:43:33 -0700 2009 Wed Sep 02 16:44:54 -0700 2009 2 0 false false Sun Jul 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Sun Aug 10 03:35:05 -0700 2008 Sun Aug 10 03:40:11 -0700 2008 more...]]> 4 0 false false Mon Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 2007 Mon May 12 11:26:17 -0700 2008 Mon May 12 11:32:21 -0700 2008 I am not sure what it was about this book that made me love it. The detached perspective of the main character, th...more...]]> 3 0 false false Fri Aug 07 08:30:25 -0700 2009 Fri Aug 07 08:31:15 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Thu Sep 10 19:27:36 -0700 2009 Thu Sep 10 19:27:36 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Sat Nov 29 11:38:28 -0800 2008 Sat Nov 29 11:38:32 -0800 2008 http://www.goodreads.com/book_link/follow/8?book_id=16276