John Henry Days by Colson Whitehead

This book caught my eye due to its title: John Henry Days. My sons’ names are John and Henry. So I picked it up at Half Price Books, skimmed the excellent reviews on the back and tossed it into my cart. Shouldn’t have. While there were a few interesting parts, overall it was a difficult book to read, one that I completed in about twice the amount of time that it should have taken, simply because I didn’t feel like picking it up.

The writing itself was impeccable. Whitehead has a way with words, and I enjoyed how he spun descriptions of people. And the main plotline (a junketeer named simply J. attends a festival in a tiny Southern town celebrating the first year of a John Henry festival) was fairly interesting. The problem was, Whitehead had about 15 other plotlines going simultaneously. They alternated between confusing and dull: a man in the 1930s researching John Henry, a man in the 1960s? writing John Henry songs, John Henry himself.

The one part of the book that I really liked; the part that made me keep going in the hope that Whitehead might drop another such passage into his novel (no go): one of J.’s fellow journalist friends described his experience at Altamont in 1969. I’d heard of this concert before, and the rioting and fighting and deaths that occurred when a Hell’s Angel (acting as “security”) stabbed a man during a Rolling Stones performance. But Whitehead does an incredible job of detailing everything that went on from the perspective of one man. It was almost impressive enough to make the rest of the book worth it. Almost.