The novelist Colson Whitehead is in that category of modern writers that I read or plan on reading to figure out why I hear about them so much. I've been aware of him at least since an interview in which he discusses his then-latest novel, Sag Harbor (2009). His popularity has increased slightly in the interim. And yet, year after year, I've put it off. He once wrote an essay in which he listed all the possible novels to write next and I formed a suspicion: Maybe he's merely a skilled imitator of other styles, not an originator of a style, or at least a writer who makes a valiant effort to become one. When I finally did order a book of his last year, nothing special had swayed me, it was simply time. Though he's written a number of acclaimed books, I started where I'd always intended to start, Sag Harbor, an autobiographical novel about the days of his youth spent vacationing with his family. Seeing as that I have my notes handy, I'll copy-and-paste a couple:
The first chapter is over fifty pages (in my large print edition). It's more personal history and local history and anthropological study and travelogue in freewheeling essay form than novel. There are few scenes. Only one is extended.
Alarm: He packs in so much material - a loosely connected digression about movie theaters, a paragraph-length run on shoelaces, a multipage description of frozen foods - that it drifts. Close to formless.
I remember thinking he was overeager to please, wearing the reader down with how clever he is. At about 100 pages, I was out. That's too long to wait for a vivid character to emerge. I recited a Lichtenberg aphorism: "The lines of urbanity and humanity rarely coincide." Even so I wasn't done with Whitehead. The thing about a writer who writes so many different kinds of books is that I can't feel satisfied that I learned about what he or she does by reading just one. Sneaky.
The Underground Railroad was checked out so I chose another book of his that got my attention, the novel that came after, The Nickel Boys (2019). It's about Elwood Curtis, a black kid growing up in Florida during Jim Crow. Raised by his grandmother after his parents abandon him, he eventually develops into a fine student with dreams of answering Martin Luther King's call to action and joining the civil rights struggle. But one day he's found guilty of a crime he didn't commit and thrown in a juvenile reformatory school, the Nickel Academy. There, he befriends a fellow student, the more streetwise and cynical Jack Turner, who, out of necessity, has spent his life living by his wits. The novel tells the story of their two fates.
The Nickel Academy is based on the notorious Arthur G. Dozier School, which operated for about 100 years before closing down amidst controversy. Here's a way to tell that the book is based on research. One stretch involves a boxing match between a black kid and a white kid. It's not badly written, just lacking. Whitehead doesn't display a grasp of the action and atmosphere of the sport, leading me to conclude that he isn't even a casual boxing fan. FX Toole seems to set the standard for boxing fiction with his only completed book, Rope Burns. He knew everything there is to know about the sport. He may have turned that fight into a story or novel. Compare the two: One is the outsider who applies a general approach to the material, the other is the insider who brings the reader into the fight. Or compare Whitehead with Whitehead, the boxing match with a later scene, at the NYC Marathon. He glides over the events of the ring but he's clearly seen his fair share of marathons, knowing precisely how the action plays out and who attends and what it means to a character philosophically. I flipped to the back to confirm: Whitehead lives in New York City. The same demarcation can be found between his NYC and Florida. One is an imagined place, filled in as necessary with details that can be picked up by doing homework. The other is the real deal. It makes for a spotty read, back and forth between varying degrees of connection and magnification.
Whitehead also shares a quality with a couple of other writers who were once and perhaps still are on the same list, George Saunders and Jonathan Franzen: Contrivance. Fiction one cannot get lost in, as Harold Bloom observed, is that in which everything is known. It's the acid feeling of being unsurprised by what happens because the writer is unsurprised. I won't say any more than I already have about the plot of The Nickel Boys because I guarantee that most any reader (or anyone who watches movies or shows) could correctly guess the book's every last twist and turn. His characterizations are frequently formulaic too. Introduce a character with a name plus a quirk: A with the smelly hair. B with the bass voice. The - back to my notes - "fat kid who burped up breakfast in powerful gusts."
Yet, as with Nicholas Nickleby, I finished this novel and without dragging myself to the final page. There's something I like about it: the book's spirit, the writer's palpable anger and disgust and defiance and fragile hope. In his examination of the past, Whitehead shows how racism infests every aspect of his characters's lives. It can be as petty as holding a door for someone that doesn't make eye contact, doesn't say thank you. It can mean having castoff textbooks from the white school filled with racial slurs. And, most crucial of all, it means your life is cheap. The law assumes your guilt. Can't contest if you can't afford a lawyer. And if you can somehow afford a lawyer, despite meager pay and limited opportunities, and one is willing to represent you, there is no authority to file a complaint with if he absconds with your money. This is what happens to Elwood, who winds up stuck at the Nickel Academy, the respectable name of a state-sanctioned facility that exists to profit off children when they aren't being sexually abused, tortured, and murdered.
If I read Saunders and Franzen again, it'll be with resignation. And I doubt their books are the sort to be banned. But if anyone disturbed and threatened by all this talk of "racism" and "historical injustices and depravities" bothers to learn about The Nickel Boys, it will have the honor of being at or near the top of any such list across the country. Whitehead is older and not so eager to please (he refers to it as one of his "serious" books). He can write a well-structured, polished, readable novel. I'll be looking to see if he's capable of more.
