Procrustes Stretched
This place is nothing without the membership.
- Dec 1, 2008
- 67,009
- 11,211
Visiting an Elusive Writer, and Revisiting His Masterpiece
I can't believe it's been 21 years since this book took the publishing scene by storm. I overlooked it. But I now get to read it and listen to it.
The novel takes in a wide cross-section of Manchester County’s population in the decades before the Civil War. The reader meets dozens of characters, Black and white, enslaved and free, all of them connected in some way to Henry Townsend, a free Black man who is also a slave owner, with 33 human beings in his possession at the time of his death.
In the early 1990s, as the novel began to germinate, Black conservatives (including Clarence Thomas, his Holy Cross classmate) were coming to prominence. They were among the inspirations for Henry Townsend. “Not only Black conservatives,” Jones pointed out, “but Black musicians, movie stars and sports people. And I said those kinds of people, without political or social consciences, those Black people would have owned Black slaves.”
The point of writing about a Black slaveholder isn’t to engage in a kind of perverse historical whataboutism, but rather to expose...The “peculiar institution,” as it used to be called, is a human institution, with laws and customs and loopholes that sometimes disguise but more often rationalize its bottomless cruelty.
Henry’s parents, Mildred and Augustus, scrimped and toiled to purchase their son’s freedom from Robbins, their former master. Their sense of betrayal when he becomes a master himself..."Don’t you know the wrong of that, Henry?” Augustus asks. “Papa, I ain’t done nothin I ain’t a right to,” is Henry’s answer. “I ain’t done nothin no white man wouldn’t do.”
...
Not that the contemplation of human awfulness is the whole of the job. The people in “The Known World” can be tender, brave and silly, qualities of the species that have also endured for thousands of years. What remains startling — what may explain the book’s enduring power more than anything else — is their vividness and variety.
Our critic talks to Edward P. Jones about how he imagined “The Known World,” recently voted the best work of fiction by an American writer in the 21st century.
www.nytimes.com
By A.O. Scott
July 16, 2024
“May I ask what this is about?”
Edward P. Jones and I were in an elevator, not far from the White House in Washington, D.C., on our way up to The New York Times bureau. Jones’s most recent book was published in 2006. Why did I want to interview him now?
The book took shape in Jones’s mind long before it emerged on the page. When I asked him, at the end of our conversation, about his writing process, he said he didn’t have one:
I can't believe it's been 21 years since this book took the publishing scene by storm. I overlooked it. But I now get to read it and listen to it.
The novel takes in a wide cross-section of Manchester County’s population in the decades before the Civil War. The reader meets dozens of characters, Black and white, enslaved and free, all of them connected in some way to Henry Townsend, a free Black man who is also a slave owner, with 33 human beings in his possession at the time of his death.
In the early 1990s, as the novel began to germinate, Black conservatives (including Clarence Thomas, his Holy Cross classmate) were coming to prominence. They were among the inspirations for Henry Townsend. “Not only Black conservatives,” Jones pointed out, “but Black musicians, movie stars and sports people. And I said those kinds of people, without political or social consciences, those Black people would have owned Black slaves.”
The point of writing about a Black slaveholder isn’t to engage in a kind of perverse historical whataboutism, but rather to expose...The “peculiar institution,” as it used to be called, is a human institution, with laws and customs and loopholes that sometimes disguise but more often rationalize its bottomless cruelty.
Henry’s parents, Mildred and Augustus, scrimped and toiled to purchase their son’s freedom from Robbins, their former master. Their sense of betrayal when he becomes a master himself..."Don’t you know the wrong of that, Henry?” Augustus asks. “Papa, I ain’t done nothin I ain’t a right to,” is Henry’s answer. “I ain’t done nothin no white man wouldn’t do.”
...
Not that the contemplation of human awfulness is the whole of the job. The people in “The Known World” can be tender, brave and silly, qualities of the species that have also endured for thousands of years. What remains startling — what may explain the book’s enduring power more than anything else — is their vividness and variety.
Our critic talks to Edward P. Jones about how he imagined “The Known World,” recently voted the best work of fiction by an American writer in the 21st century.
Visiting an Elusive Writer, and Revisiting His Masterpiece
Our critic talks to Edward P. Jones about how he imagined “The Known World,” recently voted the best work of fiction by an American writer in the 21st century.
By A.O. Scott
July 16, 2024
“May I ask what this is about?”
Edward P. Jones and I were in an elevator, not far from the White House in Washington, D.C., on our way up to The New York Times bureau. Jones’s most recent book was published in 2006. Why did I want to interview him now?
The book took shape in Jones’s mind long before it emerged on the page. When I asked him, at the end of our conversation, about his writing process, he said he didn’t have one:
