This book won the Pulitzer Prize last year. I just finished it, and I am not ashamed to admit that I just don’t get it.
I thought the characters were very thin, plot was thin, and it left these huge gaps of interesting things it could have explored but just… didn’t. Then it just ends with a Michael Bay-style explosion-fest. Or maybe that’s more a Tarantino-esque rampage?
Simplistic stilted prose and unimaginative plot aside, this book has a lot of head-scratchers for me. Like, I get the idea that Jim was begging for his own story and deeper characterization, but writing him into a black-American slave revenge fantasy seems to me to be a weird choice and honestly kind of a disservice.
Him killing doesn’t bother me at all, him learning to own his anger doesn’t bother me at all, but what the hell was the point of all of it? What’s with the shoe-horning in of this bombshell that Huck is actually his son with no foreshadowing and then forgetting all about it 20 pages later?? Huck is unquestionably white somehow, and in the first half of the book Jim keeps almost leaving him in the dust with no real hesitation and then does so in the end, all while family is supposedly super important. What about Jim and Huck’s mom? What happened there? Does he not really remember her or have any affection for her? What about Sammy and/or Norman and the potential for them to become deep characters and found family for James?
There’s so much interesting potential here that just gets left in the dust for the lesser interesting choice at every turn.
Further… educated slaves does not break my immersion. Code-switching does not break my immersion. But the idea of basically every slave being well-educated and even erudite is absurd, especially considering it still takes white people starting the civil war to free them. Seriously, this book toys with the idea that ‘knowledge sets you free’, but no slaves have figured out how to rise up. In reality, keeping them uneducated was a big part of controlling them. The idea of every black person using slave-era AAVE ONLY in front of white people while actually speaking white English very well does a HUUUUGE disservice the the idea that black people of today have a unique and distinct culture of their own, largely descended from these times. If it was all an act, why wasn’t it dropped the minute emancipation came along?
Again, I don’t care that this isn’t a historically accurate portrayal, but it seems like it’s just weird immersion-breaking choices all along that way. James is written as a very smart man and he just spends the entire book making the dumbest, most rash decisions he could possibly make while protected by some very thick plot armor.
I dunno. I was excited to read this and wanted to like it, but it really fell flat for me.
by tarrasque
2 Comments
I think you are missing a lot of context. Have you read the original work this is based off of at all? Have you studied slavery? Jim Crow era? Are you qualified to dismiss a black man writing another black man how he wants to?
The important thing about this book is that the underlying theme is a black man getting to write and give voice to a character who was treated as a plot point in the original work he existed in.
> Huck is unquestionably white somehow, and in the first half of the book Jim keeps almost leaving him in the dust with no real hesitation and then does so in the end, all while family is supposedly super important.
If Jim claimed Huck as his son, he would be harming Huck by outing him as the child of a slave and subjecting Huck to slavery. So he is protecting him, in a twisted way.