The startling triumph of The Underground Railroad

Slavery is the sort of topic that makes novels seem trivial, even as it demonstrates in blood the power of a pernicious cultural fiction. Writing a novel about it—as Colson Whitehead has done, with startling success—is like taking a selfie in front of an active volcano: you’re lucky if you just get away with looking small.

Of course, great novels have been written about slavery, and this history adds another layer of risk to Whitehead’s project. Readers of The Underground Rail­road may find themselves, rather ghoulishly, comparing it to Beloved, Kindred, Middle Passage, Flight to Canada, The Known World, or the great slave narratives of Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Doug­lass, or Solomon Northup—a caliber of competition few novelists would willingly invite. (That such a list can exist at all is white America’s shame and black Amer­ica’s triumph.)

Another, far less significant history shadows this book as well: Whitehead’s history of writing novels that fail to live up to the memory of his 1999 debut The Intuitionist, which memorably applied the Thomas Pynchon/Don DeLillo mode—essayistic riffs unfolding alongside a slightly cartoonish plot driven by technology and politics—to the lives and conflicts of black Americans. As each new Whitehead book rolled through the literary publishing hype-machine, drawing its spate of admiring reviews—many of which, after the brilliant but frustrating sophomore effort John Henry Days (2001), featured some variation on the phrase “His best since The Intuition­ist!”—it was hard to escape the feeling that his was a talent limited by its own cleverness.