Understanding Colson Whitehead: Revised and Expanded Edition by Derek Maus

Abstract

Reviewed by: Understanding Colson Whitehead: Revised and Expanded Edition by Derek Maus Maria Bose MAUS, DEREK. Understanding Colson Whitehead: Revised and Expanded Edition. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2021. 172 pp. $59.00 hardcover; $14.99 e-book. "I think I just don't want to do the same thing over and over again," novelist Colson Whitehead muses in a 2013 interview. And that allows me to just challenge myself: can I do a book that has less plot? Can I learn the rules of a horror novel, and adapt it to my own concerns about the world? Can I do a coming of age novel that doesn't remind me of all the stuff I hate about coming of age novels? So I'm trying to keep it fresh for me. I'm just trying to not bore myself. And if I can do a detective novel, and if I can do a horror novel, then why do it again? (2) Derek Maus's Understanding Colson Whitehead opens with this anecdote and, by and large, takes it on trust. For Maus, 'understanding' Whitehead amounts to making sense of his intentional "flirt[ation] with genres and their conventions"—something Whitehead himself describes as "wearing genre drag" (1)—by finding ways to unify his extraordinarily diverse "subjects, settings, narrative voices and styles; his sweeping command of both popular culture and literary history; and his oft-stated resistance to overarching concepts" (8). Yet having acknowledged that resistance, as well as Whitehead's own leeriness of conceptual designation, Maus proposes two such concepts as consolidators of Whitehead's ranging formal enterprise: "historiographic metafiction," which he draws from Linda Hutcheon's influential theory of postmodern reflexivity, and "the postsoul aesthetic," which he borrows from Mark Anthony Neal's account of contemporary Black artists' disaffection for the authenticating cultural injunctions of their Civil Rights-era forbears. Doubling down on his 2014 thesis, Maus reasons that, although Whitehead's novels resist generic pigeonholing, their unities might yet be glimpsed through Hutcheon's and Neal's critical lenses, both of which "allow for (or possibly even demand) a great diversity of expression while still meaningfully clustering groups of authors and their works together according to common artistic and rhetorical techniques in the first instance and a particular generational zeitgeist in the second." Both, he adds, are also "critical discourses that are not so arcane as to require a highly specialized vocabulary—beyond the names of the terms themselves—or an advanced degree in literary analysis to understand." And while "[n]umerous scholars have applied one or the other of these approaches to individual works by Whitehead," he notes, "none have yet combined them, much less used that combination to consider Whitehead's entire output" (9). The chapters that follow offer lucid accounts of that output, examining The Intuitionist (Chapter 2), John Henry Days (Chapter 3), Apex Hides the Hurt (Chapter 4), The Colossus of New York, Sag Harbor, and Zone One (Chapter 5), and The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys (Chapter 6, new to the 2021 edition). But because they unfold as essays in the application of 'historiographic metafiction' and 'the postsoul aesthetic'—less as arguments about Whitehead's novels and nonfiction than as a single, sustained argument on behalf of the explanatory power of these concepts' conjuncture—Maus's own commitment to these concepts' critical purchase inadvertently undermines the 'great diversity of expression' he imagines this approach to Whitehead's work preserves. [End Page 319] What's lost, then, and somewhat curiously, in Maus's account of Whitehead's generic diversity is both a deep engagement with genre—with Whitehead's calibrated motivation of the terms and problematics through which each genre he chooses to 'wear in drag' mediates a distinct set of ideological transformations—and a historical attention to the contemporary conditions of production—and of literary production in particular—out of which Whitehead writes. To be sure, The Intuitionist's Lila-Mae is understandable as a figure for the meta-historiographer skeptical of "accepted cultural truths about race and gender" (37). But doesn't Whitehead also exploit the detective genre's literary traditions the better to address economic, juridical, and ideological shifts...