After the Post(al)

Abstract

Although they might not make an obvious generational pair, I am not the first to suggest that we should read Philip Roth and Colson Whitehead together. Michele Elam, for instance, has noted that Roth and Whitehead both produced millennial novels about racial passing: Roth’s The Human Stain (2000) and Whitehead’s The Intuitionist (1999) are surely two of the most important American novels to have emerged right around the turn of the century. And while I am interested in both novels, my focus here is on what we might usefully glean from the fact that Roth and Whitehead followed—Whitehead immediately, Roth, after returning to his Kepesh novels in The Dying Animal (2001)—these millennial fictions about the sometimes invisible histories of race with novels that make stamps central. Whitehead’s John Henry Days (2001) is about the release of a commemorative John Henry stamp at a special postal service event in Talcott, West Virginia, and Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004), his hugely successful counterfactual historical novel about the years 1940–42, stresses postal culture: Charles Lindbergh gets his start as an airmail pilot; the young Philip Roth in the novel is an avid stamp collector; and as “the country’s foremost philatelist” (1), much is made of Franklin Roosevelt’s interest in them. In the novel, stamps represent and symbolize a shared (if flawed) national history, and thus play a crucial role. To turn from racial passing to stamps may sound deflationary or even trivial, but I argue that these authors’ common interest in a (coming) post-postal age is part of a larger discussion about the nature of fiction’s efficacy for historical critique and allows us to begin thinking through how the American fiction of the twenty-first century distinguishes itself