I did not know Colson Whitehead could write like this. This is on another level. I need to pick up all of his earlier works.

I am befuddled by these reviews. I have tried to read The Intuitionist 4 times; APEX is a riff on all the good in John Henry Days; Sag Harbor worked better as a short story. But John Henry Days? This is about my 11th time reading it, this time in prep for teaching it again for the first time in almost 10 years. I'm basing the star rating (really a 3 1/2) on this read of it, which for me has lost a little of the magic since a) I know what's going to happen and b) I've poured over every line a 100...

Some shit to make you quit your job. Every possible look at John Henry's race against a steam drill as model for modern work ethic (modern, at least, circa-late 1990s, early 2000s, before economy receded). For those out there who aren't happy to have a job, who are still asking why am I doing this pointless thing every day just for $, step between these pages and take a load off. Author feels you. He feels heaps other stuff, too; book is chock full of Eustachian tube-clearing funny jokes and spo...

Whitehead is without a doubt one of the most skilled writers in American literature. His sentences are dense and filled with meaning, but also beautiful, vivid, and expressive. He shines here, in his take of the John Henry story, exploring its origins, its interpretations, and how it has penetrated deep into the canon of American mythology, culminating at a festival commemorating Henry's fatal attempt to defeat a steam powered machine aiming to displace human steel drivers. All that said, the st...

John Henry Days is written in an interesting narrative style. It shows us events through the lens of multiple characters, some repeatedly visited, others glimpsed just once or twice. A man named J. Sutter is the one most frequently observed, so I suppose he is technically the main character. But the true MC is a particular weekend in a particular town where an event possibly took place many years earlier, featuring a person who possibly existed. The event was a man defeating a machine at the fea...

It Didn't Start With President TrumpThe divisiveness, polarization, and anger in American society did not start with the current president and shouldn't be fully laid at his door. For many years, Americans have been unmercifully criticizing their country and one another. Literary examples are many, including Colson Whitehead's novel "John Henry Days". This book is long and broad-themed in the tradition of the Great American Novel. The book is overwritten and mannered. Characters and story are le...

What a wonderful find and a generally unknown mystery for most West Virginians. In "John Henry Days" we have a local story (Talcott is just 20 miles down river from me), a WV tale, and one of the finest and most accessible Postmodernist novels ever written. I have been reading and rereading the novel for a while now and it has been an immense pleasure each time. It is a work of tremendous detail on human existence. Like all great Postmodernist novels it is an unrepentant criticism of Late Capita...

Irritatingly overwritten.

It is pretty clear to me from this book that Whitehead is a versatile and ambitious writer. I really liked the Delillo-like riffs on simulacra and modern malaise, the Doctorow-like ability to time travel to a historical era and the Kunzru-like (only Whitehead did it here first) dive in to African American cultural appropriation. The book uses the fictional launch of a John Henry commemorative stamp (to be part of a set that will include other American folkloric heroes Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill and...

I confess to being awed by Colson Whitehead. This novel is just astonishing. I am pretty sure my mouth dropped open at several points. A sort of fantasia around the fictional release of a commemorative stamp honoring the folk hero John Henry, the book convincingly imagines a wide range of American lives--all the people associated with the festivities planned to launch the new stamp, including journalists, publicists, a small town's officials and citizens, assorted guests (such as a stamp collect...

I really enjoyed this book, though it is definitely the weakest of Whitehead's three novels. Of course, "The Intuitionist" and "Apex Hides the Hurt" were so brilliant that most novels are weaker than them. "John Henry" also suffers from sophomore over-reaching; Whitehead is clever to the point of genius. but that is actually the books failing, as it is often clever without restraint. The lines "So much depends upon a red pickup truck, filled with crackers," and "a runway model dares to eat a pea...

Damn, to've read this in 2001 when it was fresh, when Colson Whitehead was just the weird dude who wrote about the elevator inspectors. We've all experienced the greatness of his work since then, all the way to the culmination of everything that came before in The Underground Railroad, and so it's a little obvious to say that this book is, like pretty much all of his work, astounding. But this book is dense, it is confounding, it leads you down paths that it doesn't explain. And the ending, of c...

Whitehead’s first three novels, of which this is the second, strike me as different than his recent work; they’re more elaborate in their construction (especially this one) and more allegorical in their nature. Whereas Whitehead from Sag Harbor onward strikes me as more direct, more character-driven; just as focused on the impact of systems like racism and capitalism on his characters as on analysis of the systems themselves. Which is not to say that early Whitehead is dry - he was always wicked...

This one has been on my shelf for a few years--I read Sag Harbor, The Intuitionist, Apex Hides the Hurt, and Zone One multiple times so obviously I'm a huge Whitehead fan, but for some reason John Henry Days slipped through the cracks. I'm glad it did, because it gave me a new Whitehead book to read while I waited for The Underground Railroad to come out. It didn't disappoint. I usually have extremely limited tolerance for books that jump POV as much as this one does -- they more often than not

I DNF at 21 percent. I tried to finish this book, but honestly nothing was grabbing me at all. Initially, I was intrigued about how Whitehead would weave in John Henry into the story, but instead we seem to be flip flopping between different narrative styles. I really loved "Underground Railroad" and was hoping for more of the same here, but this book really needed some magical realism or something like the former book to really make it stand out."John Henry Days" takes a look at folk hero John

Although I'd rate Whitehead's more recent Sag Harbor higher for pure enjoyment, this one places near the top on the admiration scale. With its multiple narrative perspectives on the John Henry legend, it's an ingenious tour de force of folklore and pop culture. The writer loves words and their use in the service of cleverness and wit. I may have missed some of the allusions, but I did get a major guffaw out of --I think my memory serves here--"Everything depends on the red pick-up truck filled w...

A really impressive and fascinating novel in many ways. The story of John Henry as song, as legend, as tourist attraction is the narrative thread. The focus is on John Henry Days, a festival in West Virginia that has been created to celebrate John Henry and the issuing of a stamp of him, but more importantly to bring tourists to two small and economically struggling towns. Much of the story is through the eyes of J. Sutter, a black journalist and junketeer, whose visit to the festival has been p...

Before this I'd only read The Underground Railroad, but Whitehead's reputation preceded him: he's versatile and has a permanently active, connection-making mind that's on full show in John Henry Days. John Henry is an American folk hero, although he probably did really live, in some form or another, a steeldriver on the C&O railroad. Faced with the prospect of losing his job to an automated steam drill, he's said to have challenged the drill to a contest, and won, before dropping dead of exhaust...

This novel is about people who come together to celebrate figure of folklore John Henry, when he is commemorated by a stamp in his hometown of Talcott, WV. The primary narrator of this novel is junketeer J. Sutter, a man we readers know almost as little as we know about John Henry, another sometimes narrator. Other narrators include the daughter of a John Henry memorabilia collector, a railroad stamp collector. Here is a black anthropologist/ ethnographer: “… John Henry has become a byword, a sy...

Tough to rate. Whitehead’s writing is 5-star superb; his sentences cut you like glass. But the story never fully developed for me. He fell short of his own ambition in that respect.