John Henry Days
by Colson Whitehead
Doubleday

"John Henry Days" may be the best second book in recent memory. It is full of blindingly bright prose and tight description. Its author, Colson Whitehead, has an amazing eye for historical detail. The novel has a focus at once narrow in its subject — the legend of John Henry, the mythical steel driver who died after beating a steam drill in a race — and broad in its approach, covering not only the people and festival surrounding the introduction of a John Henry stamp, but an imagined history of the legend itself. But for all his skill and insight as an observer, Whitehead has yet to overcome the flaws that bedevil most beginning writers: stilted dialogue; a confusing, and at times stalled, plot; and a sudden, unsatisfactory conclusion.

Whitehead's first novel, "The Intuitionist," won the QPB New Voices Award and was a finalist for the Ernest Hemingway/PEN Award; the critics broadly agreed that he was a writer to look out for. And "John Henry Days" doesn't disappoint. Whitehead even pulls off a tricky non-linear story line in which a central narrative, following a freelance writer covering the John Henry Days festival in Hinton, W. Va., is interlaced with chapters highlighting moments in the development of the John Henry myth, from the story of the contest itself to the Tin Pan Alley writer who put it to song to Paul Robeson's infamously short run as the lead character in the myth's Broadway incarnation. Whitehead has clearly done heavy research into the nature of everyday life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and it pays off in vivid, taut characters, even those who come and go in the span of a short chapter. Whitehead's technique makes one reconsider the way a narrative is understood, and wonder if history can ever be understood as a linear development.

"John Henry Days" reads, at times, like the best of Don DeLillo. Whitehead can take the most banal, minute detail of American life and make it explode with color and light. His description of the fair held during the John Henry Days goes on for pages and pages, taking in every side of a small-town reality most of us like to forget even exists:

The secretary and deputy undersecretary of the women's auxiliary smile above cookies and biscuits. They mix the more unfortunate batches around with the good ones for cover. A small gang of suspects dally by the kegs. Overflow from cups moistens the dirt. Hijinks by the helium canisters, a chorus of castrati. You watch a balloon slide up serpentine until it disappears.

Whitehead clearly recognizes his descriptive power as the book's key strength, and he deploys it heavily throughout. And it is indeed mesmerizing. But it can only go so far. The book leaves the reader with a bad aftertaste; "that's it?", you'll ask yourself at its close. Whitehead gets so engrossed in the beautiful interweaving of the myriad histories leading up to the unveiling of the stamp that he lets the basics — plot line, dialogue, motivation — lie fallow. And the climax is so surprising and yet so superficial that it feels thrown in at the last minute, an artificial limb added to give the novel a necessary functionality, but lifeless and shallow nonetheless.

"John Henry Days" is, despite its flaws, a book worth anyone's reading, and Whitehead is certainly a writer worth following. His prose is poetic, his knowledge and feel for detail immense. "John Henry Days" is imperfect, but it is also a second novel; if something must be said, it is that Whitehead's on the right track.

— Clay Risen (clay@flakmag.com)