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The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead -- Discussio
Just finished it! My immediate reactions, unfiltered and maybe too hasty, are: first of all, very readable, but the writing style was surprisingly straightforward, even workmanlike, compared with Zone One. Almost as if he wanted to ground the novel in a more historical reality (and then decided to liven it up with the surrealistic concept of a physical underground RR?) My second reaction is related to the ending-- I felt it ended somewhat abruptly. But I've yet to go back through some of the passages I underlined and think about the novel as a whole, so I'm looking forward to reading everyone's take on it. In the meantime, I'll be reading the article and interview, thanks for the links Sherry.
I’m glad that I read this book, but, to be honest, I didn’t like it. The critics loved it, so it’s probably just me. It felt like just one horror endlessly piled on top of another, with little respite for the main character or the reader. The imaginative device of making the underground railroad literal initially appealed to me, as did the idea that different states could establish different rules for race relationships. The caveat seemed to be that the states were all evil in different horrifying ways.
Instead of being a novel about one girl in her own time, Whitehead tried to compress the mistreatment of blacks throughout American history into one book. For example, we see the twisted misrepresentation of black lives at the Museum of Living History in South Carolina, the medical experimentation under the guise of free treatment in the imaginary clinics that parallels the syphilis experiments done on poor blacks in the 20th century, the unethical use of sterilization to limit “undesirables”, which also took place in the 20th century (although it was applied to both white and blacks). The North Carolina segment with the miles and miles of hanged blacks surely was meant to evoke the lynchings that occurred sickenly often in our history, but not, as in this narrative, with the objective of wiping out the race altogether. At the end, the blacks try to help themselves, but the local whites refuse to allow this. Just like Martin Luther King, Lander, one of their most educated and peaceful leaders, is assassinated.
Whitehead is angry and I can understand that. However, the anger just got to be too much for me.
It is problematic identifying the speech of a character with the ideas of the writer, but this speech – by Lander – seemed to reflect the author’s view of American history:
America, too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all. The white race believes – believes with all its heart – that it is their right to take the land. To kill Indians. Make war. Enslave their brothers, This nation shouldn’t exist, if there is any justice in the world, for hits foundations are murder, theft, and cruelly. Yet here we are.” page 285
Has anyone else read this book? I didn't mean to discourage discussion with my reaction. This book received both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and very many positive reviews. I think it is a very important book. Maybe I was just not open enough to the message ??
I bought it for Kindle. Read the first few pages. Cancelled the order. Decided not to suffer through the turgid writing.
Whitehead was here in Pittsburgh for a lecture this year, and I'm not sure, Ann, that he wrote this book from a place of anger.The idea of a literal underground RR came from his 6 year old days when he thought of the subway when someone mentioned the Underground Railroad. That thought persisted, and he was able to incorporate it into his novel.
In spite of the fanciful premise, I believe I learned something from this book. For example, the rationale for the treatment in North Carolina, because the whites were in the minority, and what might happen if the slaves got the upper hand, was a perspective I hadn't considered before. But once this is brought up in the book, my thought was of course, this must have been a major contributing factor in favor of defending the status quo.
As a reader, I might have wished that Cora could have gained a respite once she made it to the farm in Indiana. But then again, our dirty history says something else. There's just no way to sugar coat it.
I've heard that there's a wonderful Underground Railroad in Cincinnati, and I'm hoping to take a road trip there later this summer, motivated as I am to learn more by this book.
Thanks for your insights, Mary Anne. I heard the Terry Gross interview with the author and was impressed with him.The part of the book which covered Cora's life on the plantation was difficult to read, but I think it really gave me a better understanding of how horrible it must have been to have absolutely no control over your life and labor on any kind of slave plantation, let alone the vicious Randall one.
So, why did I feel Whitehead's anger?
He started to lose me when we got to the fantasy parts in South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Indiana. In many cases, conditions were even more horrifying and more extreme. The white objective seemed to change from enslaving the black population to wiping them out entirely.
There were very few white characters and most of them were evil. Even the characters of the white stationmasters were not fleshed out. We did learn more about Ethel, the white woman who did not support her husband's work as stationmaster, and was brutally killed because of it. She assumed that slavery was just fine and appeared to harbor sexual feelings for both her young black playmate and Coral. I wasn't sure why Whitehead decided to include that information.
Let us know about your trip to the Underground Railroad Museum. I think it would be fascinating to learn more about the historical one.
I've been ruminating on this book for a few days, as I had only just finished it on the 15th. After going back through a few of the passages a couple times, and I have mixed feelings: First of all, as a work of fiction, I wasn't elated by the writing. I'd read Zone One, which was written in a beautifully haunting style, and the UR felt like dry toast compared to it. After reading the interview, it seems that Whitehead likes to change style and aspect with each book, so I guess he went for a more subdued (and flatter) style. Why not?But the whole telling of the story felt kind of detached, and informational, even the "fantasy" RR aspect was described in a very realistic way, without excessive imagination. As for the "playing with history" aspect, ie the Tuskegee experiments transplanted in an earlier time and another place, again,why not? Still, I'm not sure how that contributed to the story, other than as a deliberate effort to integrate more history into the equation.
Ann, i didn't get a real sense of anger here, thanks in part to the detached prose.
Mary Ann said As a reader, I might have wished that Cora could have gained a respite once she made it to the farm in Indiana. But then again, our dirty history says something else. There's just no way to sugar coat it. I agree, a "happy ending" would have been Pollyanna-ish and falsely optimistic, although i did feel the actual ending, with Cora on the road, left in the lurch, kind of unsatisfying. Up to the reader to imagine the rest of her destiny.
Ann, you mentioned Ethel. I found her a strange and ambiguous character (although i didn't pick up on any sexual attraction- perhaps some fascination, or confused feelings coming from her father's nightly visits upstairs) but one line Whitehead writes seems to sum up Ethel, at the end of her chapter, as she tends to Cora "A savage to call her own, at last".
Now Ridgeway was a bit of a curiosity as well, calling the slaves "it" (to neutralize and justify his actions?) yet taking in and seemingly caring for, in his way, the young Homer.
I felt that Caesar was one of the most tangible and fleshed out character; i would have liked for him to have escaped with Cora.
Finally (sorry for my long post!) Mabel, the mother, who was "redeemed" by the author towards the end, left me a bit puzzled. Her demise in the swamp seems to have been written to give closure to the reader, but interestingly, not to Cora, who we assume continues to hate her for her abandoning her.
Lots to think about in your post, Andrea! Thanks.Very interesting comments on the contrast in the style of this book and the other one you read by him. I wondered about his other books. I didn't feel the same detachment that you felt, but I know what you mean about the "realistic" descriptions - the accounts that purported to show that's just the way things were.
Ethel's sexual feelings -maybe I jumped to conclusions there, but I turned in that direction because of Ethel's childhood kissing games with Jasmine, her lack of interest in men, and the detail that she enjoyed kissing not only Cora's forehead but also her neck when she was passed out. Referring to those last kisses, Whitehead said there were "two kinds of feelings mixed up in those kisses."
You are so right about that chilling last sentence in this section: "A savage to call her own, at last."
Ridgeway was interesting because he was the spokesman for so many of the racist ideas of the time - the idea of manifest destiny and certainty that the land belonged to the "higher" -i.e. white -inhabitants who were fully entitled to wrest it from the lower orders of native Americans and blacks. He was chillingly bad, without any shading to his character. That relationship with Homer sure was strange .When he is hurt, Ridgeway says to him " Are you still there my boy?" which shows some real affection. There were "unseemly" rumors about Ridgeway and the boy in the white community, who also couldn't figure out the bonds between the two. But it might have just been that these two misfits actually had some human, not sexual, connection. They weren't able to relate to anyone else.
Mabel - yes, I thought it was very sad that Cora never knew that her mother tried to turn back. One thing was for sure - Cora just could not get a break.
The ending. Yes, I also felt it was abrupt and, given her past, I saw no hope for Cora's wounded heart.
"two kinds of feelings mixed up in those kisses."You're right Ann, looked back through that passage again; i think I must have read too quickly the first time and glossed over it as kissing games or playing doctor that all kids do. However, what might have been the 2 types of feelings? Perhaps attraction/ sensuality (with another girl) as opposed to disgust (with a black person? Very curious.
I'm wondering, given the seeming ambition of Whitehead to enlarge and comment upon African-American history, if the characters (at least the white ones) represents a certain "type" of attitude that whites have manifested towards blacks throughout the 19th century and beyond? Just an idea, ill-formed for now, but let me know what you think.
I think you are right about Whitehead's white characters representing a certain "type" of attitude that whites have manifested towards blacks throughout the 19th century and beyond.Perhaps Whitehead is pointing out that some of the white do-gooders did not have the purest of motives. For example, Ethel ‘s primary motivation in wanting to be an African missionary was the thought that the black natives would idolize her. She could have cared less about the blacks in her own house or backyard.
Ridgeway spouted off some common ideas involving manifest destiny and the “right” of whites to take whatever they needed from the blacks and Indians to fulfill their God-given place in the world. There were also whites in the book who said that blacks were cursed by God with slavery when their “ancestor” Ham was expelled by his father Noah and forced into servitude. This was a common justification at the time.
The destruction of the black settlement by whites in Indiana in the book also rings very true to me given the dismal historical record.
I was surprised that the white station masters in the book were not portrayed more sympathetically. I think that anyone involved in the real underground railroad, black or white, demonstrated a tremendous amount of courage.
But maybe Whitehead was just emphasizing that the blacks could never rely on white help. They had to save themselves.
manifest destiny and the “right” of whites to take whatever they needed from the blacks and Indians to (...)Ham was expelled by his father Noah and forced into servitude. This was a common justification at the time Yes, all the usual historical rationalizations! In the "Indiana" chapter, Whitehead also includes some of the emerging black identity philosophies and politics of the time; he contrasts the attitudes of Landers and Mingo, and perhaps a couple of others black leaders and commentators. However, I admit that I was more interested and focused on Cora, her personal growth and her budding romance with Royal, so I think I might not have given those aspects my full attention. Ultimately, that is perhaps why I felt that the URR fell a bit flat for me, as fiction. I expected more emotion and fewer didactics; at times it seemed like Whitehead was trying to fit in as many historical references as possible (well, I get it, it's historical fiction after all!) but maybe he was trying too hard to establish the foundations of the whole African-American experience, relegating his characters to symbolic or representational roles.I was surprised that the white station masters in the book were not portrayed more sympathetically Well I thought Sam was shown as an unambiguous and just person; in addition, he seemed to have warm personal feelings towards Cora and Caesar, beyond idealism or righteous duty.
Overall, I have to agree with you, Andrea. Too didactic for my tastes.You are right about Sam being decent person, who genuinely cared about Cora and the other people he helped. He was a rebel who enjoyed bucking the system. I guess I was thinking more about the initial stationmaster and Ethel's husband, who especially seemed to get short shrift.
I didn't like this book either, but I had planned to read it even before it was on our list. Seems like an awful lot of people didn't care for it.For me the writing was distant and flat, never drawing me in. Also, the episodic nature of the overall story made it less compelling, not more.
Maybe worst of all, I didn't find Cora a very riveting character. After the early scene when she axed the doghouse and reclaimed her garden plot I was ready to make this journey with her, but aside from illustrating how different she was from most of the people she lived with this rebellious behavior was the exception for her. Unfortunately, altho I felt that her mother's story was designed to create mystery and keep me wondering, I thought from fairly early on that she probably died.
About the portrayal of the underground railroad, of course I had heard about this many times before I got the book. I tried to decide what I might think about it if it had been a surprise for me, and guessed that maybe I would have interpreted it as a sort of shorthand - signaling that the author was more interested in getting to the story of the next episode than adding details of the workings of a real underground railroad. Nothing about it bothered me, and in a book I enjoyed overall it might have been a delightful departure.
Oops, had more to say, but I've gotta run! I have thoughts about the anachronistic episodes, so maybe this evening.
I agree with the many things already spoken here. I liked the book, but didn't love it. I like to fully engage with a story that I am reading and I just couldn't find that engagement happening in these pages. I can't quite put my finger on why that is. I found many informative things that I had not known before, so from a historical aspect I liked it, but as for the fictional aspect...This book will be passed along.
Okay, so ... here's the deal. After the description of their first stop, I thought to myself that this might be a cool journey thru compressed history, ending up somehow with the unresolved race relations of the present. (Made me think waaay back of the short story "The Swimmer") And so it was, in a disorganized way, but there was much that Cora encountered along the way that I just couldn't get a handle on; especially the smoldering ruins of Tennessee. And of all the confusing aspects scattered throughout the story, the last may be the most confounding to me; the three carriages on the road. I still don't know what to make of that. It felt biblical and out of place.
I took Cora's journey as a kind of Odyssey, and each stop in a state was a trial that Odysseus faced. It's been a while since I finished it, so I'm having a hard time being specific.
Very interesting comments, Tonya and Roxanne.Tonya, I was confused by the Tennessee interlude as well. At first Cora attributed the burned out devestation to the whites getting what they deserved for their treatment of the blacks and the original Indian inhabitants; a few pages later, she decided justice didn't have anything to do with it. Nature and the real world were threatening and arbitrary
. .." the world was indiscriminate. Out in the world the wicked escaped comeuppance and the decent stood in their stead at the whipping tree. Tennessee's disasters were the fruit of indifferent nature, without connection to the crimes of the homesteaders. {Without connection] To how the Cherokee had lived their lives." p. 215
Pretty bleak, but completely reflecting her own personal experience.
I don't know what the significance of 3 wagons on the road is either. The first one contained a white couple, who ignored her. The second contained an Irish boy who offered to help her but whom she had no reason to trust. Finally, she took the ride from the older, escaped slave - one of her own people.
It would be nice to think of them happy out West, where he was going with some friends. But it seems unlikely.
Tonya wrote And of all the confusing aspects scattered throughout the story, the last may be the most confounding to me; the three carriages on the road. I still don't know what to make of that. It felt biblical and out of place Yeah, what was that all about? I think that towards the end of the book I was kind of thinking why not, whatever, and chalked it up to the hodgepodge quality of the whole novel. You also mentioned the idea of a journey through compressed history-- that's a pretty accurate description of it. Sherry mentioned Cora's journey as a kind of Odyssey and that is apt: he had to get Cora in and out of different places (I kind of liked that idea, surfacing in different places and let's take it from there!) which certainly plugs into the idea of an odyssey. Unfortunately, by compressing time and playing with history, he had to throw in some fairly unpalatable info dumps, which cut the flow and put a lot of distance between the character and the reader. Well, for this reader, anyway.
As a self-confessed history nerd, I liked this article by Henry Louis Gates Jr.on the real underground railroad and the myths surrounding it. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-ameri...
I just finished the book tonight; I'm out of town helping my sister move, so can only post from my phone. I took the three carriages at the end as a twist on the biblical story of the Good Samaritan. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parab...
In that story, the person who cares for the beaten man is from a different social group and the two groups are at odds with each other. If we are to love our neighbor as ourselves, who is the neighbor in the Good Samaritan story? Answer: the one who showed mercy - the Samaritan, from whom the beaten man would not expect anything good.
But Cora expects and accepts help only from the driver of the third carriage, driven by someone who is like her. The entire episode is an extended version of the oft-repeated refrain in the book: "If we are going to improve our lot, we have to do it ourselves. We cannot expect help from any other quarter."
Ann wrote: "I’m glad that I read this book, but, to be honest, I didn’t like it. The critics loved it, so it’s probably just me."I don't think it is just you. I'm not done yet, but I'm really not liking it much either. I feel like the unrelenting horribleness is...well it's horrible, and I also feel preached to.
I'm sure that there are people who think slavery was not that bad, or even that it should be okay, but somehow I don't think that many of them are reading Colson Whitehead novels. I sort of wonder what the purpose of a book like this is, or who Whitehead imagines as his reader.
I had the same reaction to the Marra, which most everyone else in the group loves. At least Whitehead steers clear of Marra's purple prose, but I came away thinking, does he think I didn't know that these historical events were horrible for the people who lived through them? Or does he think that they are entertaining?
I feel disappointed, because I've quite liked Whitehead in the past. It's been many years now, but I had such warm memories of the Intutionist that I dragged it across the Atlantic rather than sell it to a used bookstore. I expect I'll slog through the rest of this, but I really expected a lot more from this author.
I found myself wondering what I missed and why this book received both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. I think part of what the judges liked was the unusual format - the conceit of having a physical underground railroad and the mixture of history and fantasy. Maybe the judges also decided this book was "important" because of its subject matter. I'm not sure who the intended audience was, Nicole. I felt preached to also, and I wasn't willing to assume all that white guilt he seems to have been aiming for.But I could be entirely wrong. Maybe Whitehead wrote this book for an African American audience, as a reaction to all the injustice that has taken place in our society.
In all my years as a reader, it has never occurred to me that a writer was supposed to be writing for a certain audience. I must be naive to imagine that a writer has a story to tell and the editor who worries about whether the story is marketable.
Good point, Mary Anne. Like most writers, Whitehead was probably just telling the story that he felt compelled to write.
Mary Anne wrote: "In all my years as a reader, it has never occurred to me that a writer was supposed to be writing for a certain audience. I must be naive to imagine that a writer has a story to tell and the editor..."I don't really mean audience as a marketing term. I mean more generally, in the sense that writing is a communicative endeavor, who is he writing for, particularly given how the book seems to have a Message capital M.
When I took a writing class, when talking about stories and novels the teacher said it was good for a writer to imagine telling the story to a certain kind of person. It kept the voice even and focused.
Would it be valid to talk about audience in terms of a readership's expectations? I'm not sure what I expect, as a reader, or even what type of reader (apart from constant!) I am. But, when I do choose a book, other than random picks, I tend to have some expectations.With this one, I was expecting a more literary work. Sure, there were some constructs in the fictional aspect that aspired to that, but as I mentioned before, the whole novel seemed too workmanlike for my tastes. I was also expecting references to incidents and events inspired from slave narratives and historical documents, and those were included, fairly bluntly and massively, but again, to be expected. How these fictionalized events offer anything more potent than the actual narratives they are derived from is not clear to me, though. Whitehead tweaks them a bit, and seems, on the whole, to offer a sort of commentary on race relations that many of you picked up on, but he appeared too often to be stating the obvious, in my opinion. Perhaps he's got another volume up his sleeve, from Jim Crow to post-Obama to Black Lives Matter, and is ruminating further analyses of the legacy of racism in America?
This book was tough for me to get through, both because, as Nicole noted, "the horribleness" of the subject matter (the death of Big Anthony being the worst for me, and so early in the book) and for other aspects others have mentioned. I guess I was expecting a book more rooted in history - that is, the history of a particular era, not a collapsing of many eras ... and then that weird Tennessee thing.
By the end, I was skimming just to say I'd finished, and skimming in so cursory a fashion that I completely missed the budding romance in the Indiana section referenced in one of the comments here.
A couple of people have compared this to THE ODYSSEY. To me it was an anti-Odyssey. Odysseus has a destination that is the driving force of his actions. Cora, instead, has no destination - she is journeying away from, not journeying toward. And it seems to me that, though she knew immense suffering, far from not being able to "catch a break," she, compared to every other runaway slave encountered in the book, caught break after break, in an almost Dickensian fashion. Yet, unlike all those Dickens characters, we leave her in pretty desperate circumstances. Maybe with justified hope, maybe not.
After all, she's heading for Missouri. Just like Dred Scott. (His case was first heard in a federal courthouse in Missouri!)
Great comments Mary Ellen. When I said that Cora could not catch a break, I was thinking of the pain in her personal life. In spite of losing everyone who was dear to her - her mother, Caesar, Lovey, Royal - it is true that she herself did manage to repeatedly escape from bondage. Of course, without that, the story would have come to an even more abrupt end. :-)
Good catch about Missouri. Let's hope that she and her new friends got onto that trail to California without being apprehended.
Ann, you are so right that every hope Cora had, every affection she developed, was crushed. This is one of the bleaker pieces of fiction I've read in a while.
I read this for a double purpose, because in addition to the discussion here I also had to lead a discussion in my library's book club this month. In the end, of about a dozen participants only two of us liked the book. The dividing line seemed to be that we were the only two who normally read experimental fiction; the others objected to the lack of realism in the literal railroad and the anachronisms, while the two of us who enjoyed it liked it especially for those aspects. As usual I'll start with my Goodreads review, but this time I'll have a lot of other comments to make as well.
"Recently, books about slavery have become almost an industry; it seems that I am cataloging one or two every week at the library. Many have some sort of stupid gimmick, like the white slave girl in Kitchen House. At first sight, this seemed like the same thing: a slavery novel with a bizarre gimmick (the Underground Railroad as a literal underground railroad, I mean, really. . .). But as I read further, I realized that it was actually something else: not a historical novel at all, in the traditional sense, but an experimental novel about the treatment of Blacks in America.
"My first take on it was that it was an alternative history, in a South where the Civil War had never happened, exploring the possible ways that slavery might have evolved if the South had been left to its own devices, with the various states showing different possible outcomes -- Georgia, where slavery continued more or less as it was (and by the way, the account of the plantation seems much more accurate than in most of the novels of this sort; Whitehead based it on the actual slave narratives rather than on white historians); South Carolina, where there is a pretense of being progressive with an underside of sophisticated racism; North Carolina, where the Blacks were essentially exterminated; Tennessee, on the border, where there is fighting between the slaveowners and raiders from the North; Indiana, where Blacks try to exist independently on their own and are opposed by the white racists and so forth. I would have set it about 1870 or so. I still think it could be read that way. But then I read an interview with the author, who said it was intended to be set before the Civil War, in about 1850.
"As I thought more about it -- and this is a book which provokes thinking -- I saw that it in effect abolishes chronology altogether; the South Carolina episode in particular not only anachronistically introduces elements from the 1930s (the Tuskeegee experiment) but also satirizes the liberal, patronizing racism of much of the actual North in the twentieth century, and could also be read as a description of neo-liberal regimes in much of the neo-colonial world; the violence of North Carolina has its echoes in many places and times as well. Essentially all of America's racial history is brought into the novel in one form or another (including the Native Americans, especially in the Tennessee episode), and the railroad functions as well in a symbolic way.
"The novel has been compared to "magical realism" and while the fantasy elements are not really magical, but more like science fiction, the technique functions in the same way. It's very well done; I can understand why the book has been so well received by the critics and won so many awards (including the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.) The ultimate impression is that Blacks are not and have never been safe in America, that racist violence is always just under the surface waiting to explode -- and this was, prophetically, written under a Black president, before the Trumpzi election victory."
Some further observations: One thing that tends to influence how I react to a novel is what else I'm reading about the same time; I have read two other novels about slavery recently, The Kitchen House for my library book club, which is one of the very few novels I've abandoned halfway through (and usually always for the same reason: historical novels which falsify the history in some way -- I think that some of those who disliked this book at my library were thinking of it in that way, as a historical rather than an experimental novel, and if I had taken it that way I would have dropped it very quickly); and Marlon James' The Book of Night Women for another group on Goodreads, which I really enjoyed -- the plantation section here reminded me of that book. The other influence was that I had just started re-reading Cien años de soledad for this group, and I thought that in a way Whitehead was trying to do for the Black experience in the United States what Garcia Marquez was doing for the colonial experience of Latin America in that novel, symbolically compressing the history and using anachronistic and fantastic (or as I said in the review, science fictional) elements to emphasize different points.
I agree with what some of you said above, that he shows the different motivations of the white supporters, and I think that is accurate as well; there are whites who support causes for the right reasons, and others who support them out of personal vanity, or a patronizing sense of noblesse oblige, or for some political advantage for themselves or as part of a larger agenda. I also thought the description of Ridgeway was interesting; for him it was just a job and he was proud of his skill (the "banality of evil", as Hannah Arendt said about the Nazis), he could kill Blacks without any qualms and yet he did not hate them personally the way that Randall for instance did, and he had that bizarre relationship with Homer.
The debates at the farm were also part of the compression, they reminded me of the debates between Black leaders like Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois, or the advocates of "Black capitalism" against the Black nationalists -- can Blacks make it within the system, or must they stand outside and fight against it?
To me, one of the criteria for good literature is that it asks the right questions, whether or not it gives the right answers or any answers at all is less important.
Thanks for your perceptive note, James. I believe that you are right that Whitehead was trying to compress the history of blacks in the United States into his novel. As a former long-time history student, I was put off by his rearrangement of facts to serve his message. At the same time, you helped me understand why his book would appeal to others. I was very interested in your pointing out that the two people in your group who liked the book also liked experimental fiction. I have to admit I am not a fan. I think the novelty of the structure and the settings is probably what most appealed to those who gave the book the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.
It's interesting that you say that, James, about experimental fiction, because one of my strong reactions is that this is not experimental enough. I was expecting the railroad to be more central in its physical reality, something Rushdie-esque or similar to some strains of Latin American fiction. I actually am feeling the railroad parts to be a little tacked on and perfunctory.
James, thank you for your thorough post. I have been increasingly disappointed by the discussion here because it seems to be dominated by those who hate this book. Hearing from an opposing point of view is refreshing.I had to check: this book is rated at 4**** by 80,000+ readers here on Goodreads. I'm pretty sure the raters aren't all African Americans or National Book Award judges.
I, too, am a history major. My alma mater's history department had a philosophy that history isn't just about names, dates and timelines. History is about ideas, themes, eras and epochs. Here's a pop quiz: take 3 works of fiction that we've read recently on CR and place them on a continuum of historical accuracy vs. total fiction: A Gentleman in Moscow, The Tsar of Love and Techno, and The Underground Railroad. What's that? You're still not willing to say this book is rooted in history?
Some have complained that the book is too grim. We've even gone so far as to complain that Whitehead wrote it that way deliberately. I submit that Whitehead chose not to pander to the book club audiences with the Oprah "redemptive" ending, but rather a more historically accurate ending. This is slavery. When Lincoln made the Emancipation Proclamation, there was no switch that got flipped for the slaves, sending them into a nice, happy future. There was a happy ending for Cora: she still managed to keep one step ahead of her demise, and she is still, by golly, free. That is the most historically accurate ending I can imagine for her.
Mary Anne, thought I'd reply since you referred to a part of my comment. "Rooted in history" was a poorly chosen phrase - of course, the book has its roots in the history of our country (and, I would say, not the history of African-Americans in our country...I think it is pointing to a vein of evil that runs through all of our history, affecting us all, crippling us all). What I should have said is that I expected, or perhaps wanted, a book that would help me enter into a particular period in history. That was not what Whitehead wanted to do - what he was doing was, in a way, more ambitious. Good for him! That I did not enjoy reading the book is not the same as my thinking it is not a good book, or well written.
I also said that this was one of the bleaker pieces of fiction I've read in a while (perhaps ever). Not a criticism, just an observation. I agree that a happy piece of fiction about slavery would be grotesque.
Perhaps in other circumstances, I would have been able to engage the book more intensely, but I am finding so much in the non-fictional world so challenging currently, that I am probably only suited to read more escapist fiction.
James, I want to thank you for such a thorough and thoughtful examination of the book. I like experimental fiction, and I can see your point about this being more an alternative history than magical realism. I thought the book was genius, and even though it was bleak and depressing, I liked it very much. I heard Whitehead speak at the Key West Literary Seminar and he was the highlight of the seminar. He is droll and imaginative and downright funny. I'm very glad he is getting such accolades for Underground Railroad. That so many people are having a hard time with it, that it is so different and unexpected, may be a good indication that it will have real staying power. I hope so.
I didn't like this book, but really! I didn't hate it! Just as I was forewarned that the underground railroad of the novel was a locomotive, I was completely aware of its reputation, awards, acclaim; it goes without saying that had an impact on my expectations and conclusions. That seems to me to be completely appropriate.
Re: experimental fiction - there could be something to that; I couldn't be sure without a list of experimental fiction titles to get myself straight on which is what. As a genre I don't pay particular attention to it, and I wouldn't have put this book into that category. I can say that made me smile just a little since the best book (by a long mile) I've read this year was Remainder, which I would never recommend to anyone else just because it is so radically 'different.' For me, the second I finished I knew that if I ever met anybody who loved it as much as I did we would probably be soulmates. Loved it, ripped thru it, think of it still, so often.
But anyway, altho I have thought more about it it is hard to explain my initial thoughts better - Cora didn't feel like a fully formed character to me, and the episodic nature of the book just felt random, disorganized. In the end I could have stopped after any of those episodes and felt just as enriched by the experience as I did when I read the final page.
Tonya, I certainly understand your feelings about UR, but would you please nominate Remainder for the list? I'm really curious now. It sounds like there could be a lot to talk about.
I loved Remainder. I think reading it also provides a pretty big contrast to this book, which really is very conventionally structured and written when set next to something like the McCarthy. (I tried to get back into again last night, hit the long section where Cora's captor in the attic is basically just providing historical exposition for pages and pages at a go, instead of real dialogue between real characters, and I just wanted to throw the book against the wall. Having an important topic shouldn't excuse such lazy writing, and I know that Whitehead is capable of better.)
I found your insights helpful, James. I loved the book. I thought it presented different sides of racism and their possibilities. Several readers didn't seem to like it because it wasn't historically accurate, but I didn't consider it historical fiction. To me, it is social commentary.
Reading about the horrific punishment, I felt like Whitehead exploited it. I'm not saying violence like that did not happen and I'm not saying it's okay, but I felt Whitehead was trying to punish the world (readers) with it. Of course, I felt sorry for Cora but felt she was a mystery and needed fleshing out.Tonya, I'm another that would like to read Remainder.
Linda wrote: "I didn't consider it historical fiction. To me, it is social commentary."I agree, Linda Experiments with structure (alternate history, fantasy, etc and social commentary took precedence over character and story development. For me that didn't work. I am glad that the novel worked for others.
I really enjoyed the novel. At first, the fact that it strayed from history really bothered me. I feel like too often, even our history books tend to not be accurate, so there is a danger when altering history. That being said, the book is a work of fiction and has no obligation to accurately depict the time it takes place in. I look at the work as a whole as a giant metaphor for the treatment of African American's throughout history. By focusing on a single character during a single era, Whitehead combines the mistreatment of a race into a single digestible story. It is powerful stuff!
Thanks for the review, Mary Anne. I think it does a good job of describing the novel.Ethan, I agree wit your statement that the book is "a giant metaphor for the treatment of African Americans throughout history."
I haven't commented here before because I've been putting my thoughts together. I found Whitehead's writing to be excellent on a sentence by sentence level and gave the book 4 stars. I also still find myself thinking about it a week after finishing.I love Ethan's description of it as a giant metaphor. But, I must be a fairly concrete person because it was difficult for me to adapt to that as I read. At one point, I asked my husband, "Did North Carolina ever actually try to get rid of all black people?' That is almost embarrassing for me to admit as I grew to understand what Whitehead was trying to do by the end.
My one criticism that I don't think has anything to do with my lacking as a reader is that Whitehead frequently wants to convey a message and has his characters tell it rather than having the story show it. I agreed with those messages but it took me out of the writing because I often thought that the character, usually Cora, would not be saying those things at that time or wouldn't be that articulate at that point.
However, I'm very glad I read it. Contrary to Sherry's experience in finding Whitehead charming personally, I had listened to his interview on Fresh Air and was put off by what I perceived as arrogance. That almost led to me giving his book a miss and I'm glad I didn't.
I've just started reading Nella Larsen for the August classic here, and I decided to read her other novel Quicksand before Passing. Having so recently read The Underground Railroad, I couldn't help but be struck that the school "Naxos" where Helga Crane is teaching at the beginning of the novel seems like the real life version of Whitehead's "Charleston".
Constant Reader
Books mentioned in this topic
Quicksand (other topics)Passing (other topics)
Remainder (other topics)
Zone One (other topics)
Cora, the runaway slave, goes through an odyssey of trials from her plantation in Georgia, to the Twilight Zone of South Carolina, to the brutal North Carolina Dante’s hell. Tennessee is a further descent in a literal burning hell. Indiana is a respite, but the respite is short-lived, when slave catchers find the safe house of the decent people who are trying to help.
A review from the NYT:
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/14/bo...
An interview with Terry Gross: http://www.npr.org/2016/11/18/5025580...
An interesting article from The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...