The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

The long opening segment of Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad is carefully, almost studiously naturalistic.  In plain, but also irresistible and affecting language, he presents the life story of his heroine, Cora, starting first with the history of her grandmother, kidnapped from Africa and finally ending up, after much circumlocution (which is to say, being sold and re-sold), on a Georgia plantation, and moving on to detail the life of Cora's mother, who escaped when Cora was a child, and finally to Cora herself.  Whitehead's eye for the details of life on the plantation--and in particular, life in the insular, predatory community that arises among the slaves--is unflinching.  Many reviewers before me have noted the brutal quietness with which he reveals that "Not long after it became known that Cora's womanhood had come into flower, Edward, Pot, and two hands from the southern half dragged her behind the smokehouse.  If anyone heard or saw, they did not intervene.  The Hob women sewed her up."  But the entire segment is rife with moments like this, in which the sheer weight of what it means to live your entire life under the burden of being thought inhuman is presented without adornment, or even much signposting.  Taken on its own, this part of the book would still be a brilliant literary accomplishment.

But of course, if you've heard of The Underground Railroad, that's probably not what you've heard about it.  Leaving aside its selection for Oprah Winfrey's highly influential book club, what has made The Underground Railroad remarkable and notable is what happens at the end of this chapter.  Stunned out of a gloomy kind of complacency about her situation by a brutal beating, Cora accepts the invitation of another slave, Caesar, to escape with him.  Caesar has made contact with a local station agent for the Underground Railroad, and after a grueling, nail-biting escape--even the short distance between their plantation and the station is fraught with nearly impossible dangers for a pair of escaped slaves--what he and Cora find as their supposed path to freedom is a literalized metaphor.

The stairs led onto a small platform.  The black mouths of the gigantic tunnel opened at either end.  It must have been twenty feet tall, walls lined with dark and light colored stones in an alternating pattern.  The sheer industry that had made such a project possible.  Cora and Caesar noticed the rails.  Two steel rails ran the visible length of the tunnel, pinned into the dirt by wooden crossties.  The steel ran south and north presumably, springing from some inconceivable source and shooting towards a miraculous terminus.

So dry and matter of fact is Whitehead's tone as he describes this impossible feat of, among other things, engineering that it actually takes some time for that impossibility to register.  This is hardly a new approach for Whitehead--his first novel, The Intuitionist, took place in a world in which elevator inspectors were a prestigious and tradition-bound group, closely guarding the secrets of their profession and suspicious when a new member, who is not only a black woman but who espouses the newfangled philosophy of "intuitive" elevator inspection, joins their ranks.  It sounds like a joke, but Whitehead not only presents it seriously but manages to make something soulful and even elegiac out of his premise--the racism and resistance that his heroine meets are no less hurtful because the profession she's trying to break into is ridiculous (in fact, one might argue that this is precisely the point).  Something similar is happening in The Underground Railroad.  Whitehead isn't trying to make slavery ridiculous, but by having Cora and Caesar's escape from it take the form of what is essentially a trip on the subway--they go underground in one spot and emerge in another--he unmoors slavery, and its latter-day permutations into prejudice and oppression, from a specific time and place.

As Cora is told by her first conductor, the Underground Railroad of the novel has no fixed route, no promised path to freedom.  Trains arrive on a schedule that is erratic, and their destinations are often unclear.  "The problem is that one destination may be more to your liking than another.  Stations are discovered, lines discontinued.  You won't know what waits above until you pull in."  Whitehead thus sets himself up for a sort of dark picaresque, with Cora and Caesar sampling life for escaped slaves in different states, trying to make their way to safety and happiness.  (The structure put me in mind of The Odyssey, and Whitehead namechecks Gulliver's Travels.  Though, and as one of this characters points out, both of these stories are tales about men who are ultimately trying to get home, whereas for Cora and Caesar home is a hell they must escape.)  The first of these chapters, titled "South Carolina", sets up its normalized strangeness right from the start, when Cora emerges from under ground: "She looked up at the skyscraper and reeled, wondering how far she had traveled."  Once again, Whitehead plays it completely straight, and it takes a long time for the reader to be certain that the South Carolina that Cora and Caesar have arrived in--where they are housed in dormitories, educated, and given jobs, as part of a government program to "advance" former slaves--is not just counterfactual, but a place out of time.  When that confirmation comes, however, it brings the entire novel into focus.

His patients believed they were being treated for blood ailments.  The tonics the hospital administered, however, were merely sugar water.  In fact, the niggers were participants in a study of the latent and tertiary stages of syphilis.

"They think you're helping them?" Sam asked the doctor.  He kept his voice neutral, even as his face got hot.

"It's important research," Bertram informed him.  "Discover how a disease spreads, the trajectory of the infection, and we approach a cure."

What Cora is traveling through, as she gets on and off the Underground Railroad, is not space, exactly, but history.  She experiences the different guises of American racism, the different faces it has worn and continues to wear, in a continuous physical space.  In South Carolina, Cora encounters what originally seems like kindness and liberal-mindedness, but which eventually reveals itself as self-serving paternalism.  The terms in which the authorities, who claim to be trying to help black people, actually end up restricting their choices and freedoms are taken not from the 19th century, however, but from the early 20th--forced sterilization, and proposed eugenics programs: "What if we performed adjustments to the niggers' breeding patterns and removed those of melancholic tendency?  Managed other attitudes, such as sexual aggression and violent natures? We could protect our women and daughters from their jungle urges, which Dr. Bertram understood to be a particular fear of southern white men."

This is not to say that The Underground Railroad's scheme is as straightforward as having Cora jump from one period to another.  Even within the South Carolina chapter there are elements that clearly come from different settings and time periods.  Later in the chapter, Cora is hired to appear in a display room at a recently opened museum of American history.  She plays roles in romanticized, sanitized recreations of a ship carrying slaves across the Atlantic, a slave auction, and a plantation.  Her predicament--glad for the easy work but aggravated by how it whitewashes the brutal, backbreaking labor she used to perform--echoes a modern complaint by reenactors in actual historical sites, as well as the broader discussion of how American history teaching tends to downplay the brutality of slavery and perpetuate the myth of happy, well-treated slaves.  A later chapter in which Cora, now in the hands of a slave catcher, makes a quasi-hallucinatory crossing of a desolate, burned-out Tennessee landscape lends itself less easily to historical reference, but is clearly designed to open a discussion of America's mistreatment and dispossession of Native Americans.

If there's a criticism to be made here--and to be clear, I'm not sure it rises to that level--it is that this device can have the effect of making The Underground Railroad feel programmatic.  At times it almost feels as if the novel is ticking talking points off a list--the introduction to the slave catcher Ridgeway, for example, includes a short history of the institution of slave patrols and their operation, whose language ("They stopped any niggers they saw and demanded their passes") seems designed to recall discussions I'd read recently about present-day police brutality, and how the history of policing in America has its roots in these slave patrols.  And though the fact that Whitehead has a character whom Cora meets muse that "Black hands built the White House, the seat of our nation's government" a mere month after Michelle Obama made the same observation in a speech to the Democratic convention is surely a coincidence, it also speaks to the book's need to be topical.  At points, The Underground Railroad feels like a fictionalization of the conversation that we've been having for several years, about the place of African Americans in American society, the legacy of slavery, and the way that racism continues to manifest itself, even in a society that claims to have overcome it.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, of course, especially given Whitehead's prodigious gifts as a writer, and the assuredness with which he manages his fantastic device.  But one effect that this approach has is that Cora seems to get lost in the shuffle.  This shouldn't happen--Cora is a wonderful creation, plucky but also deeply damaged, remarkable but also susceptible to the same pressures and traumas as anyone else.  One of the points Whitehead makes with her is to observe how the same courage and determination that make it possible for her to run, can also curdle into cruelty when subjected to enough mistreatment.  One of Cora's defining traumas is having been left behind by her mother when she escaped, and she is never able to forgive this betrayal.  She fantasizes about one day meeting her mother, "Begging in the gutter, a broken old woman bent into the sum of her mistakes.  Mabel looked up but did not recognize her daughter.  Cora kicked her beggar's cup, the few coins flew into the hubbub, and she continued on her afternoon errand".

The Underground Railroad is, in general, unflinching and unsentimental in depicting the psychic toll of participating, even unwillingly, in the system of slavery, whether it's Cora's myriad lingering traumas, over the things that were done to her and the things she's done, or the breakdown of even those slaves who seem inured to the hardships of slavery ("They joked and they picked fast when the bosses' eyes were on them and they acted big, but at night in the cabin after midnight they wept, they screamed from nightmares and wretched memories"), or the reluctance and terror of many of the white people who manage stations, most of whom come to terrible ends when they are inevitably discovered.  But though these points are typically well made, they also never feel like the point of the story, and this is particularly true of Cora.  By its very nature, Cora's journey can't have a destination.  If the point of The Underground Railroad is to take her (and us) through a guided tour of American racism, then the very fact that that racism is still at work--that books like The Underground Railroad are still necessary--means that she can't arrive in any sort of promised land.  Whitehead manages, with an elegance that is, by that point, unsurprising, to give the novel an ending that is satisfying without betraying his scheme, but the result is that Cora's journey loses much of its urgency.  She becomes, despite her vivid and deeply-felt humanity, more a viewpoint than a person.

What I think Whitehead is struggling with in The Underground Railroad is a problem that I've become more aware of, in recent years, in the context of fiction about the Holocaust.  At some point, you have to ask: what is the value of art about atrocity?  Can art exist merely for its own sake when it's discussing a real evil that blighted and claimed the lives of millions, or does it have to serve a purpose, be it educational or political?  Is it even right to impose a narrative--especially one that tends towards a happy ending--on an evil that by its very nature defies narrative, and which swallowed up the lives of so many?  Whitehead's choice--using the fantastic to detach his story from the conventions of narrative, and with it making the point that while slavery is over, it is also still with us--is not just brilliant, but inspiring.  But it also leaves The Underground Railroad feeling a little chilly.  It's a remarkable work, one that I am still, despite this review, struggling to describe and sum up.  But it's also one that I can't entirely love.

Recent Reading Roundup 16

It's been quiet here, I know, and in the near future the only thing I've got planned, and that tentatively, is a piece about the first half of Battlestar Galactica's fourth season once that wraps up this weekend. But for now, have some books.

1. Friday Night Lights by H.G. Bissinger - I don't read nonfiction, I don't care about football, and I have a great deal of trouble translating verbal descriptions of physical actions, such as football games, into mental images. So by all rights I should have given Bissinger's book, well-regarded and influential though it is, a wide berth. I'm very glad I didn't. In 1988, Bissinger spent a year in Odessa, Texas, following its high school football team and the town's all-consuming obsession with its fortunes. The picture he paints is both grand and tragic. Odessa, seen through his eyes, is a town that both worships its young football players and sacrifices them--their education, their health, their very futures--in order to bolster its own floundering self-image. A town whose deep-seated racial prejudices are overcome only on the football field. It's a disturbing and ugly picture, but at the same time Bissinger manages to bring across the appeal of both the game and the town's infatuation with its team. Most of all, he manages to make us fall in love with the players on the 1988 team, and hope against hope that they manage to survive their ordeal--not only that they triumph on the football field, but that they learn to live, and have something to live for and a decent chance at a good life, once the season is over.


2. The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead - I picked this book up after reading Micole's effusive reactions to it last year, in which she praised it for being a shrewd and insightful allegory of race relations in the US. This is clearly true, but as a genre reader I was struck first and foremost by the assuredness of Whitehead's worldbuilding in The Intuitionist, which takes place in a world in which elevator design, maintenance, and inspection, are a prestigious and exclusive field. There isn't a note out of place in Whitehead's construction of this world, and he effortlessly combines the real-world history of elevator manufacture with an alternate history in which elevator inspectors wear fancy uniforms and drive special cars, in which colleges are dedicated to the discipline's study, and deep and lasting schisms are formed over philosophical differences in inspectors' approaches. At the core of Whitehead's success at this endeavor is his accurate observation that elevators are what makes modern cities possible, and cities, in turn, are where civilization happens and is transformed.
   
   Which brings us to The Intuitionist's actual topic, race. Its protagonist, Lila Mae Watson, is the first black female elevator inspector, and if that weren't enough she follows the intuitionist approach towards elevator maintenance--a controversial philosophy that eschews mundane observation for a holistic sensing of the elevator's state, which has been slowly gaining traction within the elevator community, and which is dealt a crippling blow when an elevator crashes soon after Lila Mae inspects it. She immediately finds herself at the center of a political maelstrom in which race and the internal politics of the elevator inspectors' guild are inextricably linked, with different factions eager to scapegoat or exploit her. The Intuitionist stumbles a little towards its end, when Lila Mae's own investigations take a turn into the wholly philosophical that finally manages to overwhelm Whitehead's worldbuilding, but up until that point it is a stunning novel, beautifully written and conceived and chock full of ideas about race, politics, and the modern world, and in spite of this minor flaw it is one of the finest novels I've read this year.


3. Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8, Vol. I: The Long Way Home by Joss Whedon and Georges Jeanty - once the idea was floated, it seemed perfectly natural to extend Joss Whedon's Buffy into the comics medium. Whedon has been writing a successful run of X-Men, after all, and Buffy, with its wide, lovingly detailed universe, myriad recurring characters and institutions, its emphasis on continuity and well-defined plot arcs, had a comics sensibility even when it was still a television show. And, after all, working in comics frees Whedon from the tyranny of network executives, and from so many of the factors that affect and restrict a television writer's choices--actor availability, paltry effects budgets, the restrictive structure of the American television season and the constant threat of cancellation. So I was reasonably hopeful about season 8, in spite of the at best limited success I've had with comics in the past, but though I can't point to anything that's actually wrong with its first volume (which encompasses the season's first plot arc, establishing Buffy and the gang's current locations and statuses and introducing several new villains, as well as a standalone story) it just doesn't feel like Buffy.
   
   The absence of the actors hit me a great deal harder than I expected (it probably didn't help that Jeanty's artwork is competent at best, and at its weakest when he tries to draw facial expressions), but really what's bothering me is the absence of all those restrictions I just listed. I've gotten used to Buffy being served up in a certain structure (and in a certain setting, though obviously any story that followed the end of the show was going to have to be set somewhere unfamiliar), and the comics-friendly one that Whedon is serving up, in which the overarching plot slams into the reader on the first page and never lets up, needs to be a hell of a lot more compelling to make up for the absence of the less plot-oriented standalone episodes that used to characterize the beginning of a Buffy season. Instead, it feels almost perfunctory--the glimpses we got of Buffy's post-"Chosen" life in the corners of Angel's fifth season broadened into more or less what we'd imagined, but not lively or clever enough to make me curious about this new incarnation of the show. Given that this is a complete reboot of the story, I'm willing to give the season another chance, but right now my personal Buffy cannon still stops at the end of season 7.


4. The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas - this was recommended to me as a more intelligent version of the story told in Steven Hall's The Raw Shark Texts (which I reviewed in my roundup of the Clarke award nominees and found pleasant but profoundly unimpressive). There's no question that Thomas's novel is better than Hall's, and a more intelligent exploration of its core concept--the idea that human consciousness is sharable, a metaphysical plane to which humans can travel and, once there, use to manipulate the real world--but it's still not very good. The protagonist is Ariel Manto, a doctoral candidate whose topic is 19th century thought experiments, and whose thesis advisor has gone missing. When a copy of an obscure and presumed lost work--the title text--that touches on her subject falls into her hands, Ariel discovers that it describes a method of traveling into the 'troposphere,' the aforementioned realm of shared consciousness, and that it can be used to possess others and even travel in time. Unfortunately, though The End of Mr. Y is strong in its mundane aspects, most particularly its depiction of the self-loathing, knowledge-hungry Ariel (some of the novel's most compelling scenes involve Ariel talking about books she's read and the connections she draws between different disciplines, and if the book as a whole weren't so disappointing, I might have included The End of Mr. Y in my brainy books list), its fantastic elements are awkward, and the thriller plot that emerges once Ariel begins her forays into the troposphere is contrived.
   
   For all of the imagination Thomas pours into the troposphere--the way it appears to Ariel, the way she navigates it, the creatures she discovers there and her process of learning to understand both them and it--it never feels like more than an elaborate video game, and as such it is utterly familiar from so many other novels in which the protagonist travels to a meta-realm that appears as a literalized metaphor (when Ariel has the option of surfing another creature's mind, for example, she sees them as an apartment of a shopfront). The only points at which The End of Mr. Y is actually surprising is when Thomas focuses on Ariel herself, who has apparently survived a hellish childhood and young adulthood (though Thomas is refreshingly cryptic on this topic and resists the urge to tell a sob story) and developed some unusual coping mechanisms as a result, most prominently the ability not to care about any of the traditional hallmarks of adulthood, such as regular meals or a heated flat. Buried beneath Thomas's third-hand fantasy plot, there's an interesting naturalistic novel trying to claw its way out, about a damaged young woman making her own, idiosyncratic, place in the world, and it's a great shame that it never manages to fully take flight. Thomas's fantasy setting allows her to give Ariel a happy, but ultimately weightless, ending by allowing her to find a back door out of reality, but I would have liked to see Ariel come to some sort of understanding with the real world. I think that would have made for a more interesting novel.


5. Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris - Ferris's extremely well-received first novel starts out slow and shapeless as it describes a typical workday (any workday and all of them) at an ad agency in the late nineties. Told in the first person plural, its protagonist is an amorphous blob made up of the agency's workers, each of whom comes into focus in turn to tell some silly or insignificant story--a juicy piece of gossip, a tense confrontation with the office manager, an elaborate prank--in order to make their day go by faster. At first, as I said, this plotless description of time-wasting is a bit of a slog, but it quickly builds momentum and becomes a painfully accurate portrait of office life--the stultifying periods of dead time, the painstakingly detailed time-wasting rituals, the weighty question of where, and with whom, to lunch, the insular and almost intimate community one forms with people one hardly knows and probably wouldn't choose to associate with, and most of all the knowledge that huge portions of one's life are being spent doing something at best tolerable. Though the novel does have something resembling a plot--the company is struggling and laying off workers, one of whom may be planning violent retaliation; one of the executives is ill, and another is the subject of a vicious harassment campaign--Then We Came to the End is most powerful in its plotless moments, in its uncomfortably accurate recreation of the office mentality and the compromises we make with it. Like far too many workdays, it is made up of insignificant moments that somehow, almost tragically, build up into an overwhelming whole.


6. The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden by Catherynne M. Valente - like Then We Came to the End, Valente's novel starts out slow and not particularly engaging, and builds up steam, finally becoming almost impossible to put down. And there the similarities end. Valente's novel (the first in a doulogy--the second half, In the Cities of Coin and Spice, is already on my Amazon wish list) starts by telling the story of a mysterious orphan in the sultan's palace, cursed with dark rings around her eyes which contain, as she reveals to the only child brave enough to confront her, tales tattooed in impossibly small text. She begins to tell one, as a character in an Arabian Nights pastiche should, but then the protagonist of that story encounters another who tells another story, and within that story another one begins to unfold, recursing almost endlessly and, inevitably, tying into one another. What finally emerges is an intricate and well thought out mythology with some very definite themes--the restrictive roles of women in fairy tales (several stories revolve around girls sold or stolen into marriage or slavery) and the marginalization of those who are different (many of the characters are monsters, and as a result usually disowned by their parents and disdained by their communities)--which finally crescendos with the triumph of the disenfranchised and exploited, who sail off into the sunset together (though given the existence of a second volume, and the hints that the girl's stories have their parallels in the sultan's palace, the story is clearly far from over). Valente's prose is not as fine as I'd wish, and too often she aims for the yarn-spinner's compelling and unmistakably human voice and ends up with nothing more than purple wordiness, but her elaborate construction more than makes up for this deficiency, and I almost can't wait to get my hands on the concluding volume in order to find out how the story ends.