John Henry Days - Softcover

Following on the heels of The Intuitionist, Whitehead's widely praised debut, John Henry Days won't disappoint anyone who delighted in that 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 calibre, of course, much can be forgiven. But one is eager to see Whitehead make an emotional investment in his characters. The result will be fiction that engages the heart as well as the head. --Mary Park, Amazon.com

'Blithely gifted...an ambitious, finely chiselled work.' John Updike

' Hugely talented...Colson Whitehead has produced an immensely rich, many stranded novel. The writing is inspired on every page. Just Wonderful! One of my books of the year.' Time Out

'Such is the buoyancy of his talent, and the protean assuredness of his prose, that the result is controlled, poignant, wittily observed and often gleefully comic.' Guardian

'Colson Whitehead's dazzling second novel...It may be nothing new to suggest that history is fiction; but the pleasure of reading this ingenious patchwork lies in how it reminds us of the vitality of those fictions.' Independent on Sunday

'”John Henry Days” is funny and wise and sumptuously written.' New York Times

'Witty, acerbic and immensely compelling...fresh and evocative...Whitehead is a first-rate writer who has produced a novel that is compelling'. Financial Times

‘slick, subtle and very stylish’
Esquire