Pym

Review by New York Times 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."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 6, 2011]

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Review by 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

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by 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.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by 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.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book 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.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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chapter I Always thought if I didn't get tenure I would shoot myself or strap a bomb to my chest and walk into the faculty cafeteria, but when it happened I just got bourbon drunk and cried a lot and rolled into a ball on my office floor. A couple days of this and I couldn't take it so I ended classes a week early and checked into the Akwaaba Bed and Breakfast in Harlem to be among my own race and party away the pain. But mostly I just found myself back in that same ball some more, still on the floor, just at a more historically resonant address. My buddy Garth Frierson, he'd been laid off about six months before, and was nice enough to drive all the way from Detroit to help a childhood friend. This help mostly consisted of him sitting his bus driver ass on my rented bed, busting on me until I had enough shame to get off my own duff and try to make something of myself again. By then the term was over, graduation done, campus vacant. I didn't want to see anybody. The only things worse than the ones who were happy about my dismissal were the ones that weren't. The sympathy, the condolences. It was all so white. I was the only black male professor on campus. Professor of African American Literature. Professional Negro. Over the years since my original hire I pushed away from that and insisted on teaching American literature in general, following a path toward my passion, toward Edgar Allan Poe. Specifically, I offered the course "Dancing with the Darkies: Whiteness in the Literary Mind" twice a year, regardless of enrollment. In regard to the number of students who chose to attend the seminar, I must say in my defense that the greatest ideas are often presented to empty chairs. However, a different theory on proper class size was cited in my denial letter from the president, and given as a reason to overturn the faculty's approval. Curing America's racial pathology couldn't be done with good intentions or presidential elections. Like all diseases, it had to be analyzed at a microscopic level. What I discovered during my studies in Poe's and other early Americans' texts was the intellectual source of racial Whiteness. Here, in these pages, was the very fossil record of how this odd and illogical sickness formed. Here was the twisted mythic underpinnings of modern racial thought that could never before be dismantled because we were standing on them. You don't cure an illness by ignoring it or just fighting the symptoms. A Kleenex has never eradicated a cold. I was doing essential work, work affecting domestic policy, foreign policy, the entire social fabric of the most powerful nation of the world. Work that related directly to the way we lived our daily lives and perceived reality itself. Who cared if a bunch of overprivileged nineteen-year-olds with questionable hygiene could be bothered to rise for the 8 a.m. class? Who cared if I chose to not waste even more precious research time attending the toothless Diversity Committee? "Just get your books, dog. And get out of there. Pack up your place, focus on what you can do. You want, you can come back with me to Detroit. It's cheap, I got a big crib. Ain't no jobs, but still." Garth and I drove up the Taconic in the rain. I was still drunk, and the wet road was like lines on a snake's back and my stomach was going to spill. Even drunk, I knew any escape plan that involved going to Detroit, Michigan, was a harbinger of doom. Garth Frierson was my boy, from when we were boys, from when I lived in a basement apartment in Philly and he lived over the laundromat next door. Garth didn't even ask how many books I had, but he must have suspected. Because I had books. I had books like a lit professor has books. And then I had more books, finer books. First editions. Rare prints. Copies signed by hands long dead. Angela walked out on me a long time ago and my chance of children walked with her, but I had multiplied in my own way. I'd had shelves built in my office for these books, shelves ten feet tall and completely lining the drywall. The campus was dead. A vacant compound hidden from the road by darkness and hulking pines. The gravel parking lot was empty, but I made Garth park in the spot that said president--?violators will be towed on principle. When you get denied tenure at a college like this--intimate, good but not great--your career is over. A decade of job preparation, and no one else will hire you. If you haven't published enough, people assume tenure denial means you never will. If you have published and were still denied, people assume you're an asshole. Nobody wants to give a job for life to an asshole. And they didn't have to in this economy. Outside of a miracle, after denial I would be lucky to scrounge up adjunct teaching at a community college somewhere cold, barren, and far from the ocean. A life of little health insurance, bill collector calls, and classrooms with metal detectors, all compliments of this college president, Mr. Bowtie. The least I could do was shit in his space for an hour. We trudged. The building looked like an old church that had lost its faith, every step up the stairs a sacrilege. Garth huffed, but followed. I'd chosen an office in the back of the top floor to dissuade students, but my lectures had done a better job of this. My office was a narrow A-framed cathedral with a matching window. A shrine to the books that lined the walls and my own solitude. "Bro, I'm not going to lie to you. I got a lot of books in here," I said, letting him in first. "You do?" Garth asked me. Because I didn't. It was empty. I should have been greeted with the hundreds of colored spines of literary loves, but there was nothing. My books were gone. My office had been cleared out. Everything was gone: my pictures, my lamp, my Persian rug, everything not school property or nailed down, gone. A chasm of vacant whitewashed bookshelves opened up before me. I was breathless. Garth was out of breath, but for him, it was just all the stairs. "They took my shit, man. They took my shit," I kept repeating. I walked over to the desk and pulled out all the drawers. There were some chewed yellow pencils left, and a few folded Post-its and bent paper clips, but that's not what I was looking for. I kept searching, desperate, sliding pencils and papers around, looking for more. "Damn, dog. You didn't have no porn in there, did you?" Garth already had his Little Debbie out and was chewing on it like it was his reward for making it up three floors of nineteenth-century stairs. "Just a picture," I told him. "A picture of what?" "Angela," I admitted. "Worse," Garth said, head wagging. I slammed the drawer shut, and it was loud. And I liked that sound, a moment of violence, but this time coming from me. So then I started banging on the empty shelves with my fists, and they vibrated. You could hear the echo in the room, then bouncing off into the empty building beyond us until Garth closed the door. "That's wrong, man. Disrespectful. Forget them, job's over. That's life, what you going to do?" I was going to show up at the president's house and kick his ass, it occurred to me. This act suddenly seemed like the only thing worth running away to Detroit for. I didn't tell Garth this, because he would have stopped me. He was big enough to fill up the door. He was even bigger since he'd been laid off. I remembered when this man was skinny, ran track. Ran it poorly, but still. It was depressing looking at every extra pound on him, each a reminder that we were both moving swiftly into decline with little else as accomplishment. "Wait in the car, man. I just have to check my mail," I told him. Garth did it. I'm a bad liar, but he was tired and it was really cold outside, and brothers don't like the cold.* It was late spring, but it had been raining for a week and upstate New York was frigid in a way which was more gothic and empiric than the Philly chill we'd grown up with. #"You drunk. I'm tired as all hell. The sooner you get your ass out of here, the sooner you get to get your ass out of here," Garth offered, but he left. So then I walked over to the president's house to punch him and maybe kick him a few times too. In my head, I was getting "gangsta," which I've always felt showed greater intent than getting "gangster" in that it expresses a willful unlawfulness even upon its own linguistic representation. I was going to show him how we do where I'm from, go straight Philly on him, and I knew all about that because, although I had never actually punched someone in the face before, as a child I myself had been on the receiving end of that act several times and was a quick study. The president's house was at the other end of the campus, but it was a small liberal arts campus. An empty space, dorms and buildings deserted, solar streetlamps popping on and off for just me. While I was walking, stoking my anger, thinking of all the work I'd done and all that security I was now being denied, I came * Matthew Henson excluded. to the administration building, and I saw that there was a light on. Downstairs, in the back, in the president's office. No one just left interior lights on, the environmental footprint too massive, the cost too high, and with every attack the prices went even higher. So he was in there. The outside door opened, and I knew he was in there. And then there was this overwhelming emotion. It was not rage or anger. It was something even more illicit, unwanted. It was hope. Here we were, two men alone. Society vacated, and now just two men and a problem, one that somehow in my stupor seemed workable. There was a guy down the hall, a Romanticist, who had been denied tenure ten years ago. Approved by the faculty committee, just as I was, only to be shot down by the same president in the same manner. And he had, in his grief, approached the all-powerful boss man, and he had repented all of his sins, real and imagined, and was granted a permanent teaching gig. It made sense too, for as Frederick Douglass's narrative tells us, it is more valuable to a master to have a morally broken slave than to have a confident one. That Romanticist's story had always seemed humiliating to me before this moment, but suddenly it became inspirational. At the president's door, I paused, prepared myself for what could be simply the final test before I overcame my troubles. I took a deep breath to prepare for a performance of dignified groveling. Then I heard the music coming from inside. What I saw scared me. Took me out of my confidence, my momentum. What do you make of a Jew sitting in the dark listening to Wagner in this day and age? I could think of no more call to the end of the world than the one I was looking at. Random violence on the news had become background noise to me at that point, but this scene genuinely scared my ass. Still in his bow tie and tweed jacket at this time of night, it was disgusting. He hit his keyboard quickly, and suddenly the sound became Mahler, but I knew, I knew what I'd heard. As the sound cleansed the room, the bald man just looked at me, drink in hand. As drunk as I was, I could still smell the sweet singe of alcohol hanging in the air. "My shit!" it came out. It lacked the eloquence of a planned rebuttal, but he understood. "Packed by movers, delivered to your listed residence. A thank-you, really, for your service. Thank you." He said the last bit as if I should be saying this to him, but still it robbed me of a bit of my momentum. I had been surviving on righteous indignation and self-pity for weeks, I realized once the supply seemed threatened. But then I remembered I'd been canned and my fuel line kicked in once more. Excerpted from Pym: A Novel by Mat Johnson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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