Heartache Delicately Circles Old Tale of Man Versus Machine

There’s an ambiguity to great literature, an unsettling-ness that never dissipates. It forces questions that have no easy or apparent answers. And it does so simply by telling a story.

Colson Whitehead’s second novel is rife with this ambiguity. The primary narrative revolves around J. Sutter, a disaffected 30-something African American freelance journalist. J. has entered a twilight zone of press junkets, a world of endless media events, buffet tables and open bars. In return, J. provides content to magazines.

The current freebie is a trip to Talcott, W.Va. The U.S. Postal Service has decided to launch a commemorative stamp celebrating the mythic black folk hero John Henry, who was said to have died in a steel-driving contest with a steam drill while working on the construction of the Big Ned Railroad Tunnel in the 1870s. Invited to the opening by the publicist hired to kick off the launch, J. makes the trip from New York in the summer of 1996, utterly unenthused by the prospect of several days in the rural South. J. is a man on the verge of depression. His romantic life consists of a biweekly tryst with a publicist. “Certainly in a city of contracts and bargains,” Whitehead writes, “theirs was not the most decrepit.” In Talcott, J. meets Pamela Street, the only other African American in his motel. She has come because her father was an obsessive collector of John Henry memorabilia, and the town wants her to sell his collection to the new museum near the tunnel. Slowly, reluctantly, J. and Pamela draw closer to one another, their dance of courtship interrupted only because of the sudden violence at the novel’s end.

But Whitehead isn’t just interested in J. Instead, he uses this basic premise as a trunk for multiple branches. Less than half the book traces the story of J. and his fellow junketeers. In alternating chapters, Whitehead weaves in the legend of John Henry, and not just the legend itself, but also the various ways that the legend percolated through the subsequent hundred years. There’s an almost contrapuntal relationship between the central plot and these side stories. Sometimes, they arrive suddenly and jar the reader out of the simple plot of J., Pamela and the stamp celebrations. At other times, they lull with a gentle cadence.

Whitehead doesn’t throw many bones to the reader eager for signposts as to what these ancillary stories are supposed to mean. There is a long digression about a Chicago musician who records one of the early versions of a John Henry song, and another about a doctoral student who goes to Talcott in the days before civil rights reform to capture the oral histories of John Henry. There are also several episodes that involve John Henry himself, written with a sort of “Casey at the Bat” somberness, and several flashbacks involving Pamela’s father.

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There are subplots, one of which revolves around a psychotic stamp collector who turns the festivities into a tragedy, and another concerning the owners of the motor lodge that houses J. and the other visitors. Only here does Whitehead falter. The stamp collector who snaps violently feels like a caricature rather than a fully realized individual. “What makes him tick, this collector of stamps?” Whitehead writes rhetorically, without yielding a satisfying answer. And the owners of the motel, especially the wife, who is convinced that a ghost haunts one of the rooms, are thinly drawn and never seem essential to the overall mosaic.

But the rest of the novel is a compendium of magnificent writing, haunting images and clever phrases that combine to exude a quiet, aching pathos. Whitehead can also be biting, especially about the media-entertainment industry; he describes a party for the latest postmodern novelist, which J. attends, in almost Grand Guignol style: J. “accidentally and without realizing it dislodged a gimlet from a man’s hand, but the man did not protest because he was afraid of black people and in a subfloor of his unconscious thought perhaps he deserved it because he had made a killing that day while others shambled through the metropolis without cappuccino machines, sans arugula, pestoless.” A while later, J. watches as “the hip-hop artist in heavy rotation on the video music channel lost his clip-on gold tooth in the hummus.”

But what ultimately remains and resonates is the echo of John Henry, an archetypal man of the industrial revolution, black, strong, wordless, who expends his soul making a stand against the machine. There’s an implied parallel with J., who suffers a similar fate but with none of the physical glory, wilting in the face of an anonymous media industry, producing endless words of content that possess little or no substance. Whitehead is not the least bit didactic. The novel works as a cascade of images and stories that intrigue and engage while remaining opaque, and yet, delicately, meaning emerges. It is impossible to ask more from a novel. If Whitehead is this adept at this point in his life, one can only imagine where his talents will lead us in the years ahead.