I recently finished John Henry Days, by Colson Whitehead.  I’m a pretty big fan of Whitehead’s first novel, The Intuitionist, and I’ve been meaning to read his second novel for a while now. 

John Henry Days is a clunky, slow-burner of a book.  The novel wears its ideas on its sleeve, often getting in the way of, and ultimately displacing, the story.  Once I accepted the fact that the book was driven by ideas rather than say, a plot, I was able to dig in and appreciate Whitehead’s work.

Of course, with a title like John Henry Days, the big idea is race, specifically, the black race, in American history.  It’s Whitehead’s treatment of race in the novel that I found interesting. He doesn’t hit it head on, but rather from a number of somewhat unconventional, even reportage-like, angles, almost as if he’s crafting a documentary instead of a novel . One angle is the treatment of folk music and oral history as a means of telling (rather unreliably) the African American story, from the delta blues men and the ramblings of retired coal miners, to the tragedy at the Stone’s infamous Altamont concert.

The biggest take away for me, however, is the book’s underlying, damning critique of cynicism.  Whitehead’s protagonist, a young black journalist named J., who attends The John Henry Days fair for not much more than the free food and booze, is just about crippled by a virulent strain of cynicism that seems to be largely a product of growing up black and relatively well off, and the associated guilt such a man would carry.  J. struggles with his cynicism, and that of his colleagues, throughout the novel, and ultimately - I like to think - triumphs.

John Henry Days is not a great book, but it was one of those books that came into my hands at just the right time. I’ve slowly come to realize - and I should add that my realization has been greatly advanced by the election, the writings, and inauguration of our 44th president - that the cynicism that pervades my generation is a crutch and obstacle that we must get past to become a decent, productive successor to society. In small doses, cynicism - and its more benign counterpart sarcasm - can be a useful, even necessary coping strategy.  But when you allow your cynicism to posses you, to define you, and use it to avoid the truth, you have lost. J. realized this, and he almost lost, but in the end he managed to overcome his inner cynic, and save Whitehead’s uneven, ambitious book.