“The Underground Railroad” by Colson Whitehead
Do you have any auto-buy authors? You know, those writers who any time they have a new book out, or you find out they have like 10 books on their backlist and you think “I don’t care that I have 200 books to read, I have to have all of them.” I have a few contemporary authors I feel like way about, like Catriona Ward, Grady Hendrix, Riley Sager, Kate Atkinson, Barbara Kingsolver and Paul Tremblay. And now you can add Colson Whitehead to that list.
This is why I love doing stuff like reading the NYT Top Books list. I’m discovering authors I would never have normally read before, due to some weird prejudice I had about contemporary literature.
Reading The Underground Railroad reminded me of what books can do, and why I love to read. After struggling through half of H Is for Hawk, I was feeling a bit discouraged and disappointed. Not anymore. Did I go out and buy 3 more of his books right away? Yes, yes I did. I read this book in two sittings. From the first sentence I could not put it down. It reads like a thriller, but don’t let the readability of it fool you. It is full of poetry, rage, history, pauses of reflection, pain, abject horror and hope.
So, updated ranking:
Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
Atonement by Ian McEwan
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
The Overstory by Richard Powers
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald
Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon.
Tomorrow & Tomorrow & Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
Pacing: As I said, first sentence and I was done. I have a bad habit of checking my phone while I read and get distracted. Not with this. I couldn’t look away. It tells you not to. It forces you to watch, to see. It has heart pounding moments of suspense, balanced with empathy, compassion and beauty. As I said, anything this man writes, I’m reading.
Language/Style: Whitehead’s writing is poetic without dragging you down in pretentiousness. It is not overwritten. Rather than getting stuck in the mud of metaphors and similes, it carries you along like a river. (See what I did there…) He can destroy you with a single sentence and then the next moment pick you up and carry you along a little further. Again, don’t let the readability fool you. There are layers and they sneak up on you. Your heart is full and breaking at the same time and you have to re-read a paragraph here and there to understand why. He’s showing you something, teaching you something, calling you out on something without being pedantic and preachy.
It’s also interesting that Whitehead chose to make the metaphorical railroad a real one, which engineers and a locomotive. It lent the narrative a fantastic, speculative aspect that almost made you think “Wow this would be terrible if it were real.” Which makes it all the more jarring when you remember that it absolutely was.
What was the aftertaste? The aftertaste was simply more. It’s a short-ish novel, but layered. I felt devastated it was over, unable to continue to follow Cora’s journey. (*cough* Colson if you read this, sequel? Please?)
Did it teach me anything? I am ashamed to admit I don’t actually know a lot about this time period in my country’s history. Which is maybe why I picked up The Warmth of Other Suns as well. I did feel called out at times, but rather than feeling hurt or offended I asked myself why I felt this way. It taught me what I’m missing. There’s a line at some point about how America was Cora’s warden, but I think Whitehead also shows how America was everyone’s warden, from the Indigenous people living there before, to the Africans kidnapped and brought over, to all the poor immigrants suffering from hunger, disease and displacement. The system that was built by a few for the few.
There’s another line that will stay with me forever. It absolutely broke me. Cora, the protagonist, finds a haven of runaways and abolitionists. She receives a gift from a friend, a brand new almanac.
“She grabbed his hand. The almanac had a strange, soapy smell and made a cracking noise like fire as she turned the pages. She’d never been the first person to open a book.” (p. 301)
I’ll end it there, but I highly recommend anything by him if you haven’t tried him yet.
Happy Reading everyone,
Bryanna