Recent Reviews
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
Colson Whitehead’s novel, The Underground Railroad, captures the horror of slavery. The writing is exquisite and complex while the plot is both straightforward and sprinkled with magical realism. Cora, a young woman, lives on a cotton plantation in Georgia with an overseer as cruel as Simon Legree. Cora escapes with a fellow slave named Caesar to catch a train heading north on the Underground Railroad. In Whitehead’s telling, Cora boards an actual locomotive running beneath the ground. The novel follows Cora as she stops in different states, each with a different approach to dominating and exploiting African Americans. At every stop, Cora experiences humiliation and degradation and lives in terror that Ridgeway, the slave catcher, or someone else will capture her. The draconian Fugitive Slave Act punishes anyone who assists escaped slaves.
There are some Underground Railroad stations that are located in states that treat African-Americans relatively better. Yet each state has its own approach to denigrating African-Americans through emotional, physical, or spiritual torture. And as if the terror of being sold and separated from family isn’t enough, the brutality of the violence Mr. Whitehead describes is grotesque and gruesome. He writes, “Cora had seen men hung from trees and left for buzzards and crows. Women carved open to the bones with the cat-o’-nine-tails. Bodies alive and dead roasted on pyres. Feet cut off to prevent escape and hands cut off to stop theft.” In one scene, the plantation owners’ guests are served lunch while one of Cora’s fellow slaves is whipped in front of them and then he is doused with oil and roasted. Who are these people? Psychologically speaking, it is hard to make sense of their atrocious actions. How have they convinced themselves that this abhorrent behavior is acceptable? Though they think of African-Americans as barbarians, it is these plantation owners, overseers, slave catchers, and acquiescent Southerners who are the barbarians in this horror show as they project their own barbarism onto their slaves. It is a painful book to read.
A couple of decent folks emerge in the book, but it is dark from beginning to end. I can’t imagine how difficult it must have been for Colson Whitehead to write this book. He is a deserving recipient of both the 2016 National Book Award and the 2017 Pulitzer Prize. All Americans should read this book. It is yet another reminder that our government has offered no formal apology or financial reparations to the descendants of slaves. Though in a different form, the scourge of racism persists today. Only when the United States government and its citizens confront and engage with this horrible history will we, as a country, heal and move forward.
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
In her exceptional debut historical novel Pachinko, Min Jin Lee follows four generations of a Korean family. It is a heart-wrenching and soulful story about how family members endure and adjust to the colonization of Korea by the Japanese in 1910, their immigrant status in Japan, and the subsequent division of their homeland after WWII. The book also probes family dynamics as each individual wrestles with his or her new identity as a Korean immigrant contending with racism and discrimination by the Japanese.
Hoonie and Yangjin, a poor couple living in a fishing village on the southern tip of Korea, have a daughter named Sunja. When Sunja is in her teens, she meets a married man, Hasan, and becomes pregnant. Hasan offers to provide for Sunja and their son, but Sunja does not want the life he offers. Sunja’s mother speaks to a minister who is moving from Korea to Japan. Despite her pregnancy, the kind minister asks Sunja to marry him, allowing Sunja and her mother to escape the shame and humiliation of Sunja’s illegitimate pregnancy.
Sunja and her new husband Isek move in with Isek’s brother and his wife in Osaka, Japan where they face occupational limitations. As Sunja’s oldest son grows, he sees being Korean as “a dark, heavy rock." His greatest, secret desire is to be Japanese. Sunja’s younger son’s girlfriend wants to move to America. “To her, being Korean was just another horrible encumbrance, much like being poor or having a shameful family that you could not cast off. Why would she ever live there? But she could not imagine clinging to Japan, which was like a beloved stepmother who refused to love you, so Yumi dreamed of Los Angeles. There, no one would care that we are not Japanese.”
Sunja’s sons eventually operate Pachinko parlors in Japan, a permitted occupation for Koreans. Similar to pinball, the balls bounce around the Pachinko machine and land in random locations. And like life, Pachinko players must make decisions based on where the balls land even if the game is rigged. For Koreans, getting ahead is nearly impossible irrespective of how hard they work. The Japanese limit their opportunities and then ridicule them for not rising in the Japanese social hierarchy - a predictable pattern in systemic racism.
The family members labor and suffer but remain devoted to one another as they adapt to their changing circumstances. They experience joys and triumphs as well as despair and pain. Lee elucidates the superstitions and traditions that serve the family well and cause them to suffer. As Lee states in the opening line, “History has failed us, but no matter.” Min Jin Lee, however, succeeds in writing this epic family story that illuminates how one Korean family perseveres beneath the weight of prejudice and pain.
The Ocean at The End of The Lane by Neil Gaiman
Neil Gaiman’s award-winning 2013 novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane feels like a combination of C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, and The Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Using vivid imagery and rich allegories, Gaiman creates a story that is part parable, part fantasy, and part psychological portrait. This short engaging novel challenges readers to contemplate and interpret the events described.
On one level the book is straightforward: a nameless middle-aged man returns to his hometown of Sussex, England to speak at a funeral. After the funeral, he finds himself in the home of his only childhood friend, Lettie Hemstock. His initial memories are vague. “But standing in the hallway, it was all coming back to me. Memories were waiting on the edge of things beckoning to me. Had you told me I was seven again, I might have half-believed you, for a moment.”
His seven-year old self narrates the bulk of the book and many possible interpretations emerge. First, his beloved cat is killed and then the family’s boarder kills himself. Soon after, his mother return to work and a new boarder, Ursala Monkton, arrives to care for the young boy and his sister. The woman is cruel and mean. When the boy then shows disrespect toward Ursala, the boy’s father submerges the boy in the bathtub. Soon he sees his father and Ursula kissing in the living room. The culmination of these occurrences leads the boy to feel that an evil spell has been cast upon him. The innocence of this lonely, thoughtful child is shattered.
Scary and spooky phenomenon begin to occur and the seven-year old boy feels frightened. The story combines actual life incidents with supernatural battles between good and evil creatures. Is this precocious boy dreaming? Did all these events occur? Or is he creating narratives in his head to defend against his new knowledge of cruelty, adultery, and death?
As kids grow up, they make sense of confusing or traumatic incidents by creating narratives that mix fact and fiction. Fuzzy images and events from childhood can lurk within. The unconscious can repress memories until a child is ready to confront the event or feeling. As the narrator describes beautifully, “Childhood memories are sometimes covered and obscured beneath the things that come later, like childhood toys forgotten at the bottom of a crammed adult closet, but they are never lost for good.”
Lettie Hemstock tells the young boy, “Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. Truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.”
This realization illuminates and disappoints the boy as it suggests the judgment of adults is not to be trusted, but at least Lettie's comment corroborates his recent experiences. Gaiman’s perceptive novel penetrates this complex process of maturation and engenders empathy and understanding.
