Pym [Hardcover]

The first thing you'll probably want to know is whether you should read Poe's "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket" before picking up Mat Johnson's "Pym." The answer is, that's not necessary. Johnson helpfully spends 15 pages in the second chapter of "Pym" recapping the plot of Poe's solitary novel and discussing its still-debated meaning. This background is all you need to appreciate this new, "inspired by Poe" piece of imaginative fiction.

The novel's narrator, Chris Jaynes, is a recently dismissed professor of African-American literature. He believes Poe's enigmatic novel, which is maddeningly obsessed with notions of black and white, is the talisman that can open up our understanding of race in America. He seeks to discover, through literary detective work, "the primal American subconscious, the foundation on which all our visible systems and structures were built." Sleuthing leads to grand adventure. Jaynes assembles an all black crew of six for a voyage to Antarctica to find "the great undiscovered African Diasporan homeland." This quest is set within a satirical framework that allows Johnson to launch sallies against a slew of social and political targets.

A caution: You're probably better off not reading reviews of "Pym" found in the mainstream press and magazines -- or avoiding, at least, the type of review that spends paragraph after paragraph exposing too much of the plot, revealing too many of the critic's favorite scenes, highlighting too many jokes and puns. Please. "Pym" is a novel whose twists and turns and revelations you yourself deserve to encounter (and judge) afresh, without prior interference. Set aside those reviews for reading once you've finished.

One reason I enjoyed "Pym" is a nostalgic one. If you're a reader of a certain age you remember living through what now appears, in hindsight, to have been a golden era of the American satirical novel. There once was a tribe of writers who yanked our chains, social and political. I'm thinking of the years that saw the publication of Joseph Heller's "Catch-22," Philip Roth's "Portnoy's Complaint" and "Our Gang," and the works of Terry Southern, John Barth, Gore Vidal, Robert Coover and others. First among them was Kurt Vonnegut, who sustained a long career of telling common truth to ignoble power. Who is extending that satiric tradition into the current day?

Based on the antic fun and strength of "Pym," Mat Johnson may come to join that assembly of noble writers. The intelligence behind his satire is combined with a hearty sanity that reminds me of Vonnegut, especially.

Thanks to his uncle, I was introduced to author Mat Johnson and his new novel, Pym. Pym is part mystery, part satire, part sci-fi, and all entertaining--plus with a message. In fact, this is probably one of the funniest and most creative books that has been published in decades.

English professor Chris Jaynes has just lost his college teaching position. Not only does he not want to teach Black Literature (which he was hired to teach) but he also refuses to join the school's Diversity Committee. As the only black faculty member, it's difficult to have a Diversity Committee without any diversity. Jaynes is obsessed with Edgar Allan Poe, and especially, Poe's only novel: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. This novel is not Poe's best work, but Jaynes is haunted by Arthur Pym's sudden and mysterious demise in Antarctica, as well as the island that he discovered, Tsalal. The inhabitants of Tsalal are so black that even their teeth are black. Jaynes purchases a manuscript written by Dirk Peters (a fictional character in Poe's novel) and now Jaynes realizes that Poe's novel is probably nonfiction. With a settlement from the college, Jaynes recruits a crew of other African Americans (led by his cousin, ship captain Booker Jaynes) to retrace the steps of Arthur Pym and also, to harvest South Pole ice into drinking water (one of the last sources of pure water). What Jaynes discovers on Antarctica is not just shocking, but may also lead him to the same demise as Arthur Pym. Booker Jaynes describes it as a "snow honky problem" but it is much worse than that.

Although Pym is hysterically funny at times, Johnson makes us take a meaningful look at race. His satire and comedy hide a serious side to this story. "I like Poe, I like Melville, I like Hemingway, but what I like the most about the great literature created by the Americans of European descent is the Africanist presence within it. I like looking for myself in the whitest of pages. I like finding evidence of myself there, after being told my footprints did not exist on that sand. I think the work of the great white writers is important, but I think it's most important when it's negotiating me and my people, because I am as arrogant and selfish a reader as any other." In many respects, Johnson shows true genius. He ends Pym with a dated, diary mode--just a Poe ended his novel.

One extra bonus for me as a reader is that Mat Johnson grew up in Philadelphia (as does his character, Chris Jaynes) and he refers back to Philadelphia from time to time. In fact, I was fortunate to be able to hear Johnson read Chapter 1 of Pym in Philadelphia three days ago and it was a most entertaining evening. Unfortunately for Philly, Johnson now makes his home Texas where he teaches Creative Writing at the University of Houston. But I intend to seek out his earlier works and I will depend on his uncle to keep me abreast of any future writings.

Chris Jaynes has just been fired from his position as the token black professor at a prestigious liberal arts college. A few pages later, he has a barroom encounter with the suspiciously-named man brought in to replace him, "Mosaic Johnson, Hop-Hop Theorist," who shakes a black power fist in the air (to the delight of the self-proclaimed white-liberal patrons) and exclaims "I'm down for the fight, know what I'm saying?" The tone of satire is set, but not yet the likability of the protagonist or the intellectual seriousness of the debate. Johnson turns the subject of race inside out, standing it on its head, looking at race with an outrageous accuracy whose aim falls on black and white alike.

Much of the debate concerns the nature of blackness itself, beginning with the protagonist's own racial identity. Jaynes, like the author himself, is a mulatto, "so visibly lacking in African heritage that I often appear to some uneducated eyes as a random, garden-variety white guy. But I'm not. My father was white, yes. But it doesn't work that way. My mother was a woman, but that doesn't make me a woman either." Jaynes refuses to be confined within the expectations placed upon his race, but insists on defining himself in reference to white society. He boycotts the college Diversity Committee as a meaningless sham. He declines to teach the canonical black texts, looking instead to authors like Poe and Melville to discover "the intellectual source of racial Whiteness," that "odd and illogical sickness" which he is convinced is the true source of the problem.

When the college lets him go, Jaynes is immersed in a study of Poe's only novel, THE NARRATIVE OF ARTHUR GORDON PYM OF NANTUCKET. You do not need to know the text, because Jaynes summarizes it brilliantly, making hilarious fun of its weaknesses, but also deconstructing its codes and showing why it is worth further study. Poe's protagonist enlists on a whaler out of Nantucket. After surviving imprisonment, mutiny, shipwreck, and cannibalism, he reaches the Antarctic Ocean where he is washed up on an incongruously-sited tropical isle inhabited only by stunted natives so dark that even their teeth are black. But their hospitality is deceptive; the rest of the party is killed in a treacherous ambush, with only Pym and a friend escaping to set sail once more and reach the Antarctic ice-shelf. "But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow." These are Poe's last sentences, whose enigma, with its strong racial overtones, Jaynes finds more interesting than anything else in the book. By sheer luck (by no means the only authorial license in this splendidly tall tale), Jaynes comes across a crumbling manuscript written in a semi-literate hand that makes him believe that Poe's story was based upon true accounts, Jaynes enlists the help of a seafaring cousin called Booker and recruits five other black people to accompany him on an expedition to Antarctica in search of Poe's race of ultra-white giants, dismissed by Booker as "super ice honkies."

The rest is a fantasy-adventure in the manner of Rider Haggard or Jules Verne (who also wrote his own sequel to the Poe). Jaynes and his crew do encounter this mysterious race, whom they call the Tekelians, living in ice-tunnels underground. What follows is a re-enactment of racial history -- cautious trading, capture, enslavement, and eventual escape. The actual story becomes a little tedious during the long sojourn underground, but Johnson's observation of the changing dynamics among the black characters never palls. In a brilliant twist, Jaynes and his best friend eventually escape this world of literal whiteness only to encounter a metaphorical one, a huge bio-dome built by the painter Thomas Karvel (clearly Kincade), landscaped inside to replicate the perfect sunset world of one of his paintings. But you do not read this book for the plot or even its fantastic environments, so much as for comic acuity of the author's observations. And for the thrilling experience of watching a master of deconstruction transforming a minor text of a past century into something of major relevance to our own time.

I am amazed by how much this book ties in with my other recent reading. Most particularly, HUCKLEBERRY FINN, which Johnson now makes me see as both a statement and a critique of the American Whiteness myth. Or satires such as Ian McEwan's SOLAR and Howard Jacobson's THE FINKLER QUESTION; the latter (which does for English Jews what PYM does for American Blacks) has the more attractive protagonist, but Johnson's Chris James beats them both on that score. I am also struck by what seems to have become a major recent trend: the use of existing texts as a jumping-off point to address contemporary concerns. In the last year alone, I have read THE LOST BOOKS OF THE ODYSSEY by Zachary Scott, THE CASEBOOK OF VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN by Peter Ackroyd, and -- older, but the most significant of the lot -- FOE by J. M Coetzee, a reworking of ROBINSON CRUSOE from the perspectives of gender and racial equality. CRUSOE lies behind Poe's ARTHUR GORDON PYM also, giving Mat Johnson's reworking a literary heritage that underscores the basic seriousness of his intent. You may read the book for laughs, read it for its shamelessly non-PC shock tactics, read it for social insights, but what will remain in your mind is its ability to frame the dialogue on race in a new and useful way.