Understanding Colson Whitehead by Derek C. Maus (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Understanding Colson Whitehead by Derek C. Maus Howard Rambsy II Derek C. Maus. Understanding Colson Whitehead. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2014. 144pp. $39.95. Few African American novelists have commanded as much attention among reviewers as Colson Whitehead over the course of the last fifteen years. Since his debut in 1999, he has published five novels and two books of creative nonfiction. In the process, he became one of the most prominent “new” black literary artists of the contemporary era. Derek C. Maus’s book Understanding Colson Whitehead constitutes an important contribution to the growing body of scholarship on Whitehead. Hundreds of reviewers have commented on Whitehead’s individual books, and several literary scholars have published articles highlighting aspects of his writing. However, Understanding Colson Whitehead is the first book-length examination, and thus a notable cornerstone in what might someday become known as Whitehead studies. Indeed, such studies exist, even if informally, as evidenced by the large number of journalists, creative writers, scholars, and conference presenters who have converged on the subjects of Whitehead’s books. Among other attributes, Understanding Colson Whitehead draws on the extensive collective wisdom that has emerged from writings on Whitehead. Further, Maus’s book represents a surprisingly rare extended treatment on an African American writer born after 1960. The scholarly discourse on African American literature has, by and large, concentrated on historically significant and long established authors. Whitehead, born in 1969, is part of a generation of writers that has not yet received substantial scholarly attention, especially in comparison to older generations of black writers. In this regard, Understanding Colson Whitehead constitutes a slight generational shift, joining works such as Daniel Grassian’s Writing the Future of Black America: Literature of the Hip-Hop Generation (2009). Maus devotes chapters to Whitehead’s The Intuitionist (1999), John Henry Days (2001), and Apex Hides the Hurt (2006). Maus also analyzes what he refers to as Whitehead’s “New York Trilogy”: The Colossus of New York (2003), Sag Harbor (2009), and Zone One (2011). Understanding Colson Whitehead rewards those who are new to the novelist’s works as well as his longtime readers. Maus summarizes and then provides in-depth analyses of Whitehead’s books, highlighting the workings of the individual selections. The overall examination paints a broad and detailed picture of what Whitehead has produced over the years. Given the structural complexity of Whitehead’s John Henry Days, Maus’s chapter on that novel is particularly notable. By assembling multiple narratives to produce John Henry Days, notes Maus, “Whitehead unleashes a torrent of artifacts related to John Henry—song lyrics, folktales, sociological narratives, snippets of archival research, antique statues, postage stamps, T-shirts, and so on—to examine the far-reaching implications of the ways in which the John Henry legend has been ‘repackaged’ for different audiences over time” (37). To his credit, Maus aptly disentangles many aspects of the novel and uncovers the “trail of verbal breadcrumbs [End Page 482] scattered throughout the various parts of his wide-ranging story that enable them to cohere in a way that is not evident simply from a broad overview of the plot” (42). Maus’s chapter confirms the praise reviewers placed on Whitehead after the publication of the novel and goes further by explaining the details of Whitehead’s artistic capabilities in producing such an intricate, multithreaded novel. Understanding Colson Whitehead offers many important insights concerning the novelist’s compositions. Yet some scholars of African American literature might find fault with the fact that the book does not draw many connections between Whitehead’s works and writings by a broad range of writers, including Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Ishmael Reed, Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson, and many others. After all, a major objective of African American literary studies over the last two decades has involved highlighting the intertextuality of black literary texts and authors, or, in short, the existence of African American expressive traditions. Scholars are obviously not required to delve deeply into those traditions when analyzing the works of black writers (or writers who happen to be black). However, in the context of the current publication—African American...