[.ca] John Henry Days (ISBN 0385498209)

From Amazon.com:
Colson Whitehead's second novel posits a folk antihero for the information age: junketeer and puff-piece-writing man J. Sutter. For his latest assignment, this freelance hack is sent to Talcott, West Virginia, to cover its John Henry Days festival and the unveiling of the United States Postal Service's John Henry stamp. Sutter hasn't devoted much thought to American mythology lately, or to the epic struggle of man vs. machine, or to anything else besides padding his expense account and cadging free drinks. Still, our hero is engaged in a private contest of his own--a kind of junket jag, in which he plans to attend a public relations event every single day. Alas, this journalistic obstacle course threatens to eradicate Sutter's soul, just as the folkloric steam shovel eradicated John Henry's body. Whitehead cuts back and forth between eras and exploits. And what begins as a media-saturated satire soon turns into a jazzy, expansive meditation on man, machine, nature, race, history, myth, and pop culture--in short, on America, as expressed through the story of (who else?) a former slave. Following on the heels of Whitehead's widely praised debut, The Intuitionist, John Henry Days won't disappoint anyone who delighted in the first book's wonderfully quirky writing or its complex allegories of race. The historical set pieces here dazzle, and the author casts a withering eye on our media-driven culture: "Since the days of Gutenberg, an ambient hype wafted the world, throbbing and palpitating. From time to time, some of that material cooled, forming bodies of dense publicity." Still, these brilliant parts don't necessarily add up to a satisfying whole. Whitehead writes the kind of smart, allusive, highly wrought prose that is impressive sentence by sentence. Over the course of 400 pages, though, it can be somewhat daunting. It's a bit like eating a meal in which each of the seven courses comes topped with hollandaise sauce. Worse, some of the characters' motivations remain abstract, as if the author hovered so far above his creations that their foibles struck him as simple absurdities. In a novel of this caliber, of course, much can be forgiven. But one is eager to see Whitehead quit riffing and make an emotional investment in his characters. The result will be fiction that engages the heart as well as the head. --Mary Park

Really didn't like this book at all:
I had to read this for a class. I just could not get into this story. I normally love to read but this book just could not cut it. I would not continue reading this book by choice. I will be glad to be done with it. The instructor could have picked a better book. No one else in the class cares for this book either. A waste of my money. J. is an annoying character. Couldn't care less about him....

Long, but OK:
JHD is too long, and it sometimes takes too much of a byroad to return to the main narrative. There is much beauty in those byways, but by the time you get back to J. and Pamela, you feel you've travelled too far to be happy about your return, and the two characters don't grip you like they could or should. What made The Intuitionist such a great book - the detailled accounts - is this novel's main flaw.

In a word: wordy:
The perfect example of critics falling in love with excessive writing. Supposedly, the sentences Whitehead constructs are beautiful works of art, but I was always taught to keep things concise and precise so the reader could follow the story. Not so here. Whitehead tries to impress with his ability to use a thesaurus. I could forgive it if the characters or story itself were compelling, which they aren't. Whitehead is talented with good intentions, it's too bad critics don't try to steer him in the right direction.

Great Writing but Scattered Narrative:
I loved Whitehead's debut, The Intuitionist, but for some reason it took me a few years to get to this second novel. This sprawling work shows that while his sheer talent and style are once again on display, his ability to sustain a narrative is not. Set in 1996, the book is loosely organized around the titular weekend festival±a grand celebration in a small West Virginia town to commemorate the release of a John Henry postage stamp. This is a center which only barely manages to hold on to the multiple storylines, vignettes, flashbacks, ghost stories and Great American themes that Whitehead spins from it. A good portion of the story follows hack-for-hire J. Sutter, a freelance "journalist" who "covers" whatever product/personality/story pays for his airfare, hotel, and bar bills. A once-promising writer, he's since sold his soul for whatever freebies, access, and perks he can wrangle in exchange for a decent write-up. He's currently embarked on a junketeering streak, having attended press events every day for weeks on end. Clearly, the reader is supposed to draw some kind of parallel between his struggle to take on the corporate publicity machine and the struggle of steel-drivin' John Henry taking on the corporate steam-drill machine. Each is beat down by a grinding life, but John Henry literally dies, while J. Sutter is only spiritually dead. It's no accident that the story takes place at the start of the Internet boom, just as John Henry's legend takes place at the start of the industrial era. It's kind of an interesting gambit by Whitehead, but never really coalesces into a cohesive idea. Meanwhile, there are a ton of other ingredients tossed in the pot. There's a section on competing academics in the 1920s attempting to determine the truth of the John Henry legend. An extremely lengthy digressive story told about the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont. The story of a mild-mannered collector of railroad stamps. A nice part about the early days of recording popular songs and the scams used to increase sales. Another piece tells the story of young girl from Striver's Row buying sheet music to "The Ballad of John Henry". The tale of a Chicago bluesman making a John Henry record. Paul Robeson's ill-fated attempt to do a play based on John Henry's life. And probably a few others I forgot. One very much gets the impression that Whitehead did a ton of research on the John Henry myth in America and fell in love with all these story ideas. Each is very well-written and imagined on its own, but the presence of so many tangential parts only acts to distract from the central story, and they kind of strobe in and out, sometimes overwhelming the main plotline by being far more interesting. There's plenty to like here-tons and tons of great writing, brilliant sentences, and vivid scenes. However, the book is so crammed with fragmentary ideas and themes of race, class, capitalism, memory, and so on, that none is allowed to emerge as central. So it's one of those rare books that is well wroth reading, and yet is kind of disappointing on the whole.

Brilliant at times:
Colson Whitehead is a keen observer with a penetrating eye. Combine this with his formidable skill as a prose craftsman and the result is, in John Henry Days, a work that is at times extraordinary. It seems nothing is lost on Whitehead. He manages to steer clear of snide or pessimistic social criticisms, yet there is a sting to his words. There is not the bitterness of someone noting phantom slights or thinking everything said is personal to him. John Henry Days is about a black journalist traveling to West Virginia for a stamp commemoration of the legendary John Henry. The novel itself is also a commemoration of sorts in that it examines the legend from several points of view: the singers and songwriters of the ballad to which the legend owes its fame; the towns and people who were allegedly connected to John Henry; the historians and collectors who sought to preserve, and find the truth behind, the legend. The novel centers on a journalist named J. Sutter who is a self-described "junketeer" - someone who writes puff pieces and gets sundry freebies at the events they cover. J. is nervous about being in West Virginia and frets, jocularly to himself, about meeting a violent end there at the hands of racists. Through J. we learn about the world of media publicity and this is the best part of the novel. Whitehead presents this in a hilarious way, but it would not be so good if there did not seem to be a lot of truth to it. I got the sense that J. was mostly autobiographical and there is a brilliant exposition here on publicity. Whitehead is much more serious when it comes to the John Henry legend. For the first half of the novel it seems like he is building up to something, going back and forth between J. at the commemoration event and the historic characters surrounding the legend. New characters are frequently introduced but we always return to J. and the commemoration narrative. The problem is these new voices from the past never stop coming and the story does not really progress. The characters are never fully developed. Three-quarters through let-down sets in at the realization that things are not converging into a plot or overarching structure; there is nothing that will tie it all together - it all turns out to be merely a collage. At this point the inertia is lost; the reading becomes a chore, the solemnity begins to seem didactic. With each new section I moaned at the onset of yet another new narrative. Also, the novel's humor seems to be front-loaded, it dries up the further you go. If the theme to the novel were "man vs. machine" or a jeremiad about modernity than I missed it. If I had caught it I would have put it down at that point. Whitehead is a much better writer than that. There is a positive energy to his prose and it only falls into didacticism when it laments woes of the past. In that regard I fail to see how this is a plaint against modernity.