RaveOprah Winfrey, O: The Oprah Magazine (Oprah's Book Club Selection)
Every now and then a book comes along that reaches the marrow of your bones, settles in, and stays forever. This is one. It's a tour de force, and I don't say that lightly.
...a potent, almost hallucinatory novel that leaves the reader with a devastating understanding of the terrible human costs of slavery. It possesses the chilling matter-of-fact power of the slave narratives collected by the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s, with echoes of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and brush strokes borrowed from Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka and Jonathan Swift ... [Whitehead] has told a story essential to our understanding of the American past and the American present.
In The Underground Railroad, Whitehead has created a portrayal of pre-Civil War America that doesn't shy away from the inhumanity that wounded this country, nearly mortally, wounds that still haven't healed. Whitehead proves once again that he's a master of language — there are no wasted words in the book, and it's apparent that each sentence was crafted with exacting care ... The Underground Railroad is an American masterpiece, as much a searing document of a cruel history as a uniquely brilliant work of fiction.
The Underground Railroad isn’t the modern slave narrative it first appears to be. It is something grander and more piercing, a dazzling antebellum anti-myth in which the fugitive’s search for freedom—now so marketable and familiar—becomes a kind of Trojan horse. Crouched within it are the never-ending nightmares of slavery’s aftermath: the bloody disappointments, usually sidelined by film and fiction, that took place between the Civil War and civil rights. In Whitehead’s hands the runaway’s all-American story—grit, struggle, reward—becomes instead a grim Voltairean odyssey, a subterranean journey through the uncharted epochs of unfreedom.
The chase drama advances in fits and starts, and Mr. Whitehead sometimes strains to fit it together with the extended scene-setting that goes into characterizing each state and which more obviously excites his gifts. What remains consistent, however, is the powerful intellectual undercurrent that courses beneath the story. For in its tour d’horizon of persecution, The Underground Railroad is inquiring into the very soul of American democracy, measuring the promise of its ideals against the facts of its history.
...a book that resonates with deep emotional timbre. The Underground Railroad reanimates the slave narrative, disrupts our settled sense of the past and stretches the ligaments of history right into our own era ... [the railroad] gains real heft as a symbol of bravery and perseverance, a subterranean force in the story, which usually remains strikingly realistic ... The canon of essential novels about America’s peculiar institution just grew by one.
...[a brutal, vital, devastating novel ... This is a book that wears its research lightly, but the subtly antique prose and detailed description combine to create a world that is entirely convincing ... Everything in Whitehead’s narrative is honed to scintillating sharpness ... I haven’t been as simultaneously moved and entertained by a book for many years. This is a luminous, furious, wildly inventive tale that not only shines a bright light on one of the darkest periods of history, but also opens up thrilling new vistas for the form of the novel itself.
...The Underground Railroad becomes something much more interesting than a historical novel. It doesn’t merely tell us about what happened; it also tells us what might have happened. Whitehead’s imagination, unconstrained by stubborn facts, takes the novel to new places in the narrative of slavery, or rather to places where it actually has something new to say. If the role of the novel, as Milan Kundera argues in a beautiful essay, is to say what only the novel can say, The Underground Railroad achieves the task by small shifts in perspective: It moves a couple of feet to one side, and suddenly there are strange skyscrapers on the ground of the American South and a railroad running under it, and the novel is taking us somewhere we have never been before.
...Whitehead gives us a grave and fully realized masterpiece, a weird blend of history and fantasy that will have critics rightfully making comparisons to Toni Morrison and Gabriel García-Márquez... Lovely and rare, dark and imaginative, The Underground Railroad’ is Whitehead’s best work and an important American novel.
At moments in The Underground Railroad, the novel feels a bit hemmed in by its obligation to present a historically accurate atrocity exhibition and explain its precise significance ... Such dissonance between subject and sensibility means this novel ought not to succeed, yet it does. Whitehead finds his commonality with the fierce but rather prim Cora through her stalwart longing to do an honest day’s work for people who will honestly appreciate it ... The Underground Railroad makes it clear that Whitehead’s omnivorous cultural appetite has devoured narratives of every variety and made them his own.
...[a] masterful, urgent new book ... a tragic, disturbing necessity: that describes the feeling of The Underground Railroad. The book has imperfections – Ridgeway’s gang brushes just up against kitsch, for instance – but these imperfections overwhelmed by its immense vitality ...one of the finest novels written about our country’s still unabsolved original sin.
[Cora's] America is a still-new nation full of memorable color and characters, but it’s also raw and vicious, a place that punishes the best intentions on a whim and rewards the ruthless over and over again. While supporting players come and go, Cora remains at the center of it all yet just out of reach—less the heroine of her own story than a witness to outrageous, extraordinary history.
What never shifts, flags or wavers throughout The Underground Railroad is Cora’s resilience, which becomes analogous to the spirit of a people still wondering, to this day, what it means to be free. As much as any literary classic, Whitehead’s novel poses beautifully shaped questions that speak not just to history, or to the present day, but to eternity itself. This is a great book.
Throughout Railroad Whitehead maintains his trademark dexterous, loose prose style while heightening its efficiency. Always adept at drawing fascinating scenes, his set pieces here come off with dazzling precision.
Making the railroad literal in fiction is a daring act of speculative world-building ... The Underground Railroad differs from [it's] predecessors in the grandness of its design and in the subtlety with which it conceals the problem of historical memory in an otherwise action-packed narrative ... With deadpan virtuosity and muted audacity, Whitehead integrates the historical details of slavery with the present.
...a fiercely salient reckoning of what it means, has meant and continues to mean to be black in America ... it is a great book — beautifully written, vigorous in its horror and proxy for historical truth.
Over its first 60 pages, Whitehead’s new book, The Underground Railroad, seems to be a more traditional historical novel. It’s instead a successful amalgam: a realistically imagined slave narrative and a crafty allegory; a tense adventure tale and a meditation on America’s defining values.
Whitehead is a writer of extraordinary stylistic powers ... The Underground Railroad has moments of poignancy and horror and bleak humor. Whitehead shows how the miseries of slavery extend far beyond physical punishment and forced labor, infecting and corrupting the smallest pleasures with fear and humiliation ... The novel is less successful in delineating distinct and psychologically plausible characters. The point of view sometimes swings jarringly between essayistic pronouncement and interior monologue, and Cora remains something of a cipher.
...probably Whitehead’s finest ... For something fantastic (imagine the engineering feat), not a bit of it [the railroad] is lacking in verisimilitude; it possesses its own history and myth, spliced with just the right amount of mystery ... Whitehead’s brilliance is on constant display here.
Ridgeway, a notorious slave catcher [is] so vividly drawn that his stubble seems to scratch your cheek ... This uncanny novel never attempts to deliver a message – instead it tells one of the most compelling stories I have ever read.
So does The Underground Railroad live up to the hype? Yes, and that shouldn’t be a surprise. Whitehead has always been a smart, inventive, versatile writer, and his creative premise immediately demands your attention ... a thrilling, relentless adventure, an exquisitely crafted novel that exerts a deep emotional pull. It’s an alternate history with a bite and a heart ... a masterpiece.
This brilliant, elegant novel is a ruthless and moving look at America's original sin ... blends historical fiction with magical realism to create a striking, beautifully crafted novel.
It’s a surreal, mixtape world that splices one historical era with another for the sake of sharper perception of racial realities. Thus Cora’s perilous northward journey becomes not only a stirring adventure tale but also a symbolic recapitulation and appraisal of the larger African American story ... For all its virtues, The Underground Railroad is marred by a tendency to awkward didacticism ... The Underground Railroad must be considered that rare breed, a memorable novel without a memorable central character.
...an engaging fantasia on US race relations, given added shape and momentum by the ongoing pursuit of Cora by a monomaniac slave-catcher named Ridgeway ... What we take away from The Underground Railroad is a sense that American racism is pervasive, fluid and persistent. If these ideas don’t always seem new, that should probably be taken as a sobering reminder of the stubbornness of the problems themselves rather than a sign of Whitehead’s lack of originality as a writer and thinker.
[Some] passages and sections threaten to make The Underground Railroad a thoroughly disquieting and sometimes distressing read, even if Whitehead’s prose is masterfully terse yet three-dimensional in its presentation of pre-abolition America. However, it must be emphasized that, throughout its 320 pages, there always lingers a persevering slither of hope.
Whitehead’s finest work to date ... in imagining how things might have been in an alternate historical reality, Whitehead reminds us of the horrors, hopes and leaps of faith that shaped the actual experiences of early African Americans — and which reverberate to this day.
The Underground Railroad provides limited dialogue from the characters, but both Cora and Caesar speak plainly and think with a complexity that, if disguised in dialogue, could have cast a shadow over their nuances ... The Underground Railroad does not need to jar audiences with its gruesomeness. It manages to do that work by exposing the trauma that results from the gruesomeness ... Whitehead seamlessly ties the past to the present, turning history into a visceral experience that cannot be ignored.
Everything you’ve heard about Whitehead’s latest novel, The Underground Railroad, is true: it is a masterpiece, and it is his best book, and it might be the best American novel of the year.
...allow me to be the 1,000th person to tell you: It’s even better than the hype ... The book hums along like a potboiler, but it hits with the power of a classic ... an ingeniously plotted story that is also rich in language ... Over the course of the novel, the characters grow into complex human beings with deep histories. That’s an old, tried, and still true power of the form, Whitehead seems to be arguing here. And one we clearly still need.
Whitehead threads this alternative reality ingeniously through this otherwise realistic and often harrowing novel ... Whitehead never flinches in portraying the worst elements of the slave experience and the accompanying racist language. He also delineates many secondary and tertiary characters so crisply that I never had to stop to figure out or remember who was who. Whitehead's book is a novel, not an op-ed. But I can't help feeling that it also communicates a message for today: The Underground Railroad is still under construction. Keep swinging your pickax.
Though Whitehead’s sparse and direct prose never lingers on the brutality of slave life, he doesn’t shy away from the facts of it ... Whitehead doesn’t linger too long on the trains, either. The sci-fi nerd in you might want some technological specifics spelled out, but you’ll have to settle for the gorgeous and austere mystery of the situation ... Read this book.
Yes, it really is that good. Many of Oprah Winfrey’s book club picks are longer on sentiment than substance, but in the case of The Underground Railroad, the talk show host has given her followers a brilliant novel from the Toni Morrison of the next generation.
