John Henry Days by Colson Whitehead

 

There is no part of this novel that is not gloriously well-written, but the parts do not entirely hold together; nor does the novel add up to the sum of its parts. It's clear there are a lot of things the author wants to say about media and the early Information Age (the novel is copyright 2001, and set in 1996) as well as racism and other forms of prejudice, and I think most of those messages come through loud and clear--in many instances it seems as though the messages are louder than the story. The characters are mostly well-drawn, some much more likeable than others; the story threads get somewhat jumbled in all the flashy nonlinearity, but the shatteringly ambivalent ending/s will stick. I enjoyed reading this, but I can't say it's anything like as good as The Underground Railroad (by the same author).