Writing Like God

The Known World a novel by Edward P. Jones.  Harper Perennial.  388 pp.  *****

I have a friend who, when he wants to compliment a writer’s style, says, He (or she) writes like a god.  He’s said that a few too many times at this point, but I know what he means.  He reads a number of first-rate writers.  We’re getting older, and don’t waste our time with lesser folks.

Edward P. Jones doesn’t write like a god.  His style is one that doesn’t draw attention to itself (my favorite kind).  He has now published two volumes of stories and one novel, and the novel was ranked fourth on the top novels of the 21^st century list, the highest finish of any American.  Not bad for a first novelist.

But Jones isn’t a beginner.  He never was, as far as I can tell (though his second volume of stories seem deeper and more confident than the first).  The Known World was many years in the making.  The man is not in a hurry.

The interesting thing, which I’ve seen repeated in several interviews, is that he had planned to do a great deal of research for this novel, which concerns a black slaveowner in Virginia (not a subject we’ve heard much about), but in the end he just sat down and wrote the book.  The story came from his imagination.

And it’s as if he saw it all at once.  Jones has the unsettling habit (he does this occasionally in his stories) to jump way forward in a character’s life, so that he’s describing something that takes place when the character is seven years old, but suddenly mentions that he’ll die at the age of 94 of a stroke, or at 27 of a gunshot wound, though that has nothing to do with the storyline he’s developing.  He’s letting us know there’s a larger story, and one larger than that, and larger than that.  Just before he died, the film critic Roger Ebert—not a conventionally religious man—had a sudden vision of a much larger universe.  “The present, past, and future are all happening at once,” he said.  “Vast doesn’t begin to describe it.”

That’s the feeling I get from The Known World.  Everyone’s known world, in this little corner of Virginia, is fixed.  It’s limited geographically, also by customs and attitudes.  And though the novel is written by a black man, about the institution of slavery just before the Civil War, I would say that it’s not about race (though the portrait it paints of black lives is fascinating).  It’s not even about slavery, though that seems to be the institution that is at fault here.  It’s about the whole idea of property, having property, guarding your property, making human beings into property.  Once you allow that possibility, everything is up for grabs.  People behave badly.  Then they behave worse than that.

This novel tore me up.

The story line concerns Henry Townsend, “a black man of thirty-one years with thirty-three slaves and more than fifty acres of land that sat him high above many others, white and black, in Manchester County, Virginia.”  Townsend actually dies as the novel opens; people in this novel often die young of indeterminate causes.  They don’t know the causes and we don’t know them, but they can come at any time.  Henry’s wife Caldonia is also black, also a free person, and the family is surrounded by a black community some of whom are free, some of whom are slaves, some of whom can pass for white.  The cast of characters is huge, to the point where, at some point, I lost track of who was who.  But the essential distinction in the book is: are you free or a slave?  And for some people who are slaves, why are they slaves.  Why is a woman who is essentially a white man’s mistress, and functions as his partner, a slave?  What about her children?  And what relationship do they have with the white children he has by his legitimate wife (whom he doesn’t care for anymore)?  The situation is mind-boggling.

I think that’s the point.  The situation is absurd.  Henry’s father, who was an expert woodworker, worked for years to free first himself, then his wife, then Henry, from servitude under a white man names Rollins (who, as slaveowners went, had a rather broad attitude.  He was the man with the mistress).  Henry was the man’s personal assistant for years, and adopted many of his attitudes, so when he was finally free, he found it natural to acquire land and buy slaves to farm it, a fact that infuriated his father and mother.  (There is a wrenching scene where Henry’s father breaks a walking stick across his shoulders, saying,”That’s how it feels to be a slave”).  Henry wants prosperity.  He wants property.  And within his known world, that’s the only way to have it.

The story is really about Caldonia trying to hold onto that prosperity in the face of her grief and of a number of people who say she won’t be able to do that.  In the midst of that larger storyline, there are any number of fascinating subplots, and some of them involve injustices so blatant that they’re wrenching to read.  The Known World isn’t as uplifting as some of Jones’ other work (though there is a remarkable scene toward the end.  It doesn’t make up for all the injustices that have come before it.  It does, once again, let us know that the world is larger than what we had thought).  But you won’t see the institution of slavery in the same way ever again.