"Here was the true Great Spirit, the divine thread connecting all human endeavor -- if you can keep it, it is yours. Your property, slave or continent. The American imperative."
Colson Whitehead's blend of magical realism and painstaking detail combine in "The Underground Railroad" to create a stunning, emotional, jarring novel that speaks to American's past, present, and future. This work won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and you don't have to get many pages in before the honor immediately establishes itself as well-earned.
"'There's room enough for different notions when it comes to charting our path through the wilderness. When the night is dark and full of treacherous footing.' ... 'We can't save everyone. But that doesn't mean we can't try. Sometimes a useful delusion is better than a useless truth. Nothing's going to grow in this mean cold, but we can still have flowers.'"
The novel was largely composed of a series of vignettes that lend texture and backstory. Hitting closest to home, North Carolina was rendered as something akin to Gilead from Margaret Atwood's "Handmaid's Tale." While this representation was painful to read, it did serve to make the story even more accessible.
"Stolen bodies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood ... It was still the south, and the devil had long nimble fingers."
The protagonist, Cora, experiences a fraught, heart-stopping journey that is littered with obstacles, pain, and devastation, with a wispy thread of hope running alongside and somewhat behind. Her inability to let herself love Caesar or Royal is both understandable and devastating, and the eventual revelation of the outcome of her mother, Mabel, was quasi-ironic and starkly authentic.
"Who was she? Where was she now? Why had she left her? Without a special kiss to say, When you remember this moment later you will understand that I was saying goodbye even if you did not know it."
There were a few quibbles along the way -- some metaphors felt a bit on the nose, Caesar's fate felt omitted for too long -- but they are swept away under the sheer power of Whitehead's prose. He is able to personify evil in an accessible way by placing it primarily within a few key characters, most notably Ridgeway, whose specter loomed over every moment of the book.
The New York Times referred to the book as "almost hallucinatory" due to its "mythical dimension," and that description is apt. "The Underground Railroad" is a compelling read that can be difficult to embrace but is essential in every way -- in particular at this pivot point and nexus of the contemporary human experience.
"Who you are after you finish something this magnificent -- in constructing it you have also journeyed through it, to the other side. On one end there was who you were before you went underground, and on the other end a new person steps out into the light."
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