Underground Railroad

By Colson Whitehead
2016
Rating: 6.5

Underground Railroad is a mostly great novel that vividly documents the horrors suffered by millions of slaves over the course of hundreds of years in the United States. It reads not like an account of a “dark time” in our nation’s past, but like an account of a literal Hell on Earth. Which slavery was.

Like most white Americans, I know less about slavery than I should, for various reasons, not the least of which is the very deliberate and pervasive efforts White America makes to erase slavery from our history. That said, I read a lot of news; I saw Twelve Years a Slave (which wrecked me emotionally for hours afterwards), and I’ve ingested other slavery-related texts.

None of them had the impact on my consciousness concerning slavery that Underground Railroad did. It had a galvanizing effect on me.

Although it does take some magical-realist liberties with its subject matter, Underground Railroad is most successful as a documentary text.

The novel’s main problem was a lack of character development. The protagonist is a woman, Cora, and my sense throughout the book was that she was never fully rendered. She reads like a mere vessel for experiences.

This lack of character development in turn may have been why the portions of the book that take place outside of the plantation where Cora was born and raised seem somewhat bolted together.