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Summary
Summary
A comic journey into the ultimate land of whiteness by an unlikely band of African American adventurers
Recently canned professor of American literature Chris Jaynes is obsessed with The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Edgar Allan Poe's strange and only novel. When he discovers the manuscript of a crude slave narrative that seems to confirm the reality of Poe's fiction, he resolves to seek out Tsalal, the remote island of pure and utter blackness that Poe describes with horror. Jaynes imagines it to be the last untouched bastion of the African Diaspora and the key to his personal salvation.
He convenes an all-black crew of six to follow Pym's trail to the South Pole in search of adventure, natural resources to exploit, and, for Jaynes at least, the mythical world of the novel. With little but the firsthand account from which Poe derived his seafaring tale, a bag of bones, and a stash of Little Debbie snack cakes, Jaynes embarks on an epic journey under the permafrost of Antarctica, beneath the surface of American history, and behind one of literature's great mysteries. He finds that here, there be monsters.
Author Notes
Mat Johnson was born and raised in Philadelphia, and has lived most of his life elsewhere. He is the author of several novels and graphic novels including Drop, Hunting in Harlem, and Incognegro . Johnson is a faculty member at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program and lives in Texas with his wife and children.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Social criticism rubs shoulders with cutting satire in this high-concept adventure from novelist (Hunting in Harlem) and graphic novelist (Incognegro) Johnson. Shortly after Chris Jaynes, a struggling "blackademic" at a small Hudson Valley college who has a particular interest in Edgar Allan Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, is passed over for tenure, he lucks into a copy of an unpublished 19th-century manuscript that suggests Poe's novel, which was partially set in Antarctica, was drawn closely from truth. From here, the story takes a forceful turn into the weird and funny: Chris's cousin has a scheme to use Antarctic ice for a bottled water empire. A crew is assembled-including Chris's ex-wife and his lifelong Sancho Panza, Garth Frierson, an unemployed bus driver and devotee of a schlock painter modeled on Thomas Kinkaid-and soon Chris is hoping to resuscitate his professional and romantic life, and also find the island of Tsalal, the "great undiscovered African Diasporan homeland... uncorrupted by whiteness." Though the love story is flat and some of the secondary characters are narrowly portrayed, the book is caustically hilarious as it offers a memorable take on America's "racial pathology" and "the whole ugly story of our world." (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Chris Jaynes, professor of African American studies, has been denied tenure for his refusal to sit on the Diversity Committee at his university and for his intense interest in Edgar Allan Poe. Enraged, he nearly implodes before discovering a lost manuscript proving that Poe's only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, is a factual account. Jaynes devises a mission to find the lost, black-inhabited island near Antarctica described in Poe's narrative, setting off with an all-black crew that includes his seafaring cousin; his obese friend Garth; his ex-fiancee, Angela, and her husband, Nathaniel; and two flamboyant mechanics. They discover that something else described in Poe's narrative is also real: giant, yeti-like, albino humanoids living in large colonies below the ice in Antarctica. This extension of Poe's adventure is a romp that surprises on every page. Funny, insightful, racially important, Pym is a death-defying adventure and a probing examination of notions of race, even at the farthest ends of the earth.--Hunt, Julie Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
"IF we can identify how the pathology of Whiteness was constructed," the narrator, Chris Jaynes, proposes early in "Pym," Mat Johnson's relentlessly entertaining new novel, "then we can learn how to dismantle it." For Jaynes, the only black male professor at an "intimate, good but not great" college, the project of making whiteness visible has led to an obsession with "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket," the only novel by Edgar Allan Poe. It's as good a place as any to begin. Toni Morrison has written that "no early American writer is more important to the concept of American Africanism than Poe," and his single work of long fiction is a simmering trove of racial terror. Poe's protagonist, Pym, is a hapless seafarer whose adventures culminate in the discovery and exploitation of Tsalal, a tropical island located improbably close to Antarctica and populated by primitive natives so dark even their teeth are black. "Horrors from the pit of the antebellum subconscious," Jaynes calls them. The Tsalalians soon rebel, making them, in Jaynes's eyes, the only indigenous population ever to successfully thwart colonization. Pym flees by canoe, and the story ends abruptly, with an image that has flummoxed and fascinated readers ever since: as Pym rows toward a chasm, an enormous, shrouded human figure rises before him, with skin "the perfect whiteness of the snow." Jaynes lays out all this and more in a rollicking early set piece, managing to make literary criticism as funny and action-packed as anything to come. That is very funny and action-packed indeed, as the professor - at loose ends after being denied tenure because he won't dignify the school's diversity committee with his presence - finds evidence to suggest that Pym's adventures were real. He resolves to set sail for Antarctica and Tsalal, in search of history and redemption. Conveniently, Jaynes's older cousin Booker, "the world's only civil rights activist turned deep-sea diver," is keen on getting into the lucrative business of turning glaciers into bottled beverages. (Drinking from the tap "has been taboo since the Dayton Dirty Water Disaster, one of many elliptically mentioned harbingers of doom in the novel.) Booker asks Jaynes to assemble an all-black skeleton crew, partly so their fledgling company can receive minority-business tax breaks and partly because he doesn't trust white people. Jaynes recruits his childhood friend Garth Frierson, an unemployed bus driver whose greatest pleasures are gorging on Little Debbie snacks and making pilgrimages to gaze upon the anodyne landscapes immortalized by the planet's most popular artist, Thomas Karvel (rumored to be waiting out the world's troubles in Antarctica, of all places). Jaynes also invites his much-pined-for ex-girlfriend, Angela Latham; predictably enough, she arrives with an unctuous new husband, Nathaniel, in tow. Rounding out the group are the water treatment engineers Jeffree and Carlton Damon Carter - a gay couple who run a popular blog documenting their real-life action-hero exploits - and Booker's dog, White Folks. With the exception of Garth, this supporting cast is far from robust in the personality department. Angela is so faintly drawn it's hard to empathize with Jaynes's attraction to her, the Damon Carters are a one-line joke and Nathaniel smells disposable the moment he appears. Fortunately, Johnson doesn't need any of them to lift much weight, because Jaynes's riff-heavy, insight-studded narration carries the load. And before long, the novel veers into territory so fantastical that character development seems very much beside the point. Scholars may debate whether Poe's robed, melanin-deficient giant is a symbol of perfection, death or the impenetrability of whiteness, but the creatures Jaynes discovers living in a subterranean village hollowed from the ice are undoubtedly monsters. Hulking and albino, the Neanderthal-like Tekelians (or "snow honkies," as Booker calls them) have been monitoring the newcomers all along. The beings demonstrate an immediate voracity for Little Debbie products, but communication between natives and visitors falters until an intermediary emerges in the person of Arthur Gordon Pym, who appears to owe both his amazing longevity and his constant inebriation to the wondrous properties of a foul Tekelian liquor. Pym venerates the Tekelians as gods and will speak only to the light-skinned Jaynes, assuming his darker crewmates are his chattel. Nonetheless, the double-centenarian helps broker a deal: a pair of Tekelians will accompany the party back to civilization, in return for a certain quantity of prepackaged desserts to be delivered upon their return. This is stymied when Jaynes and company return to base camp and discover that a rash of terrorist bombings has knocked all of civilization offline, or perhaps obliterated it entirely. Unable to pay their debt, the crew is forced into slavery. Before all is done, there will be escapes and traitors, cross-species alliances and daring sacrifices, to say nothing of the world's least eco-friendly and most jingoistic biosphere. It's no easy task to balance social satire against life-threatening adventure, the allegory against the gory, but Johnson's hand is steady and his ability to play against Poe's text masterly. At times, the racial pathologies Jaynes seeks to confront almost overwhelm his abilities as an interrogator, looming over the novel as inscrutably as Poe's snow man and forcing the narrator to retreat into a kind of repeated, one-note refrain. "The case was perpetually made, stuck in closing arguments with judgment ever forthcoming," Jaynes says of his cousin's collection of slavery artifacts, and occasionally the same feels true of "Pym." But far more often, the book is polyphonous and incisive, an uproarious and hard-driving journey toward the heart of whiteness. Adam Mansbach's novels include "The End of the Jews" and "Angry Black White Boy."
Kirkus Review
A struggling professor of African-American lit falls through the rabbit hole of Edgar Allan Poe's strangest tale.Multimedia writer and novelist Johnson (Hunting in Harlem, 2003, etc.) seems to have a fabulous time tinkering with wordplay and social conventions in his wildly inventive take on the roots of fantastic literature. The novel opens with an apologetic preface straight out of an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel, begging pardon for the flights of fancy that follow. Johnson then launches into the loquacious world of Chris Jaynes, a professor at a liberal Manhattan college whose interest in teaching Poe over Ralph Ellison gets him fired. His interest in Poe's adventure is flagged when his "book pimp" scores him a true rarity, a frayed copy of The True and Interesting Narrative of Dirk Peters. Coloured Man. As Written by Himself. The book is an alternative version of Poe's only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, a disjointed 1838 adventure novel that has long been the target of accusations of racism. Soon the odd professor has established the account's authenticity and even secured poor Dirk's skull from a distant descendent. This would be wild enough territory to explore, but Johnson soon ratchets things up. To further his knowledge, Jaynes launches an expedition to the Antarctic in the company of a deranged sea captain, a pal from the streets, and his old girlfriend. Traveling through a portal, the expedition finds a lost world where a desiccated, drunken Arthur Pym lives, protected by strange beasts ("Snow honkies," Jaynes dubs them). It all leads to some very funny moments of enlightenment for the conflicted professor. "Turns out though that my thorough and exhaustive scholarship into the slave narratives of the African Diaspora in no way prepared me to actually become a fucking slave," he says.An acutely humorous, very original story that will delight lovers of literature and fantasy alike.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Johnson, the author of fiction, nonfiction, and graphic novels, playfully explores race in America in his latest genre-jumping work. In the early chapters, filled with hilarious asides and footnotes, professor Chris Jaynes, a mixed-race African studies professor, is denied tenure at a prominent college after chafing at his role as token. Following a bender with an old childhood friend, now an unemployed bus driver, Jaynes uses money from the college's out-of-court settlement to begin researching Edgar Allan Poe's only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, in the belief that it holds a key to understanding race relations in America. However, the novel soon goes south, literally, when Jaynes gathers a crew of associates and travels to Antarctica, setting of the Poe novel's fantastic adventures. A global apocalypse ensues, and this leaves the group cut off from the known world while they fight a race of white, Sasquatch-like beings. Told in utilitarian prose, the spiraling events take on a comic-book quality. VERDICT An amusing read, but comic-book fans may lament the absence of graphics, while fans of satirical fiction will wish Johnson had hewn to the witty racial commentary of the early chapters.-Reba -Leiding, James Madison Univ. Libs., Harrisonburg, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.