The Known World

One of the many remarkable aspects of Edward P. Jones's remarkable novel is its style of storytelling. Set in the fictional county of Manchester, Virginia, in the years immediately preceding the Civil War, the core of "The Known World" traces the plight of the thirty-three slaves belonging to Henry Townsend, a free black man who dies at the opening of the narrative, and his widow's attempt to keep together Henry's "legacy." But this central plot is surrounded, punctuated, and jumbled by dozens of other stories, past and future, regarding Henry's former owner, his teacher, his neighbors, and his parents. Adopting a voice suggestive of Faulkner or Welty--but still uniquely his own--Jones sometimes sounds like an elderly man reminiscing about the old days while sitting on the porch--interrupting himself with scattered and random tangents, incapable of sticking to the main story but always fascinating his listeners. Often morsels from three or four different tales will be interwoven within the same paragraph. At other times, the author's phrasing recalls the cadence of the best Old Testament chronicles, especially the captivity narrative in the book of Exodus. And in still other places, Jones adopts the impassive tone of a modern-day historian, referring to wholly invented academic sources or commenting on the descendants of the book's characters decades later. "It was in the South that Anderson came upon material he would later put together in a new series of pamphlets he called Curiosities and Oddities about Our Southern Neighbors. . . . Only seven of those particular pamphlets survived until the late twentieth century. Five of them were in the Library of Congress in 1994. . ." (I confess: This passage fooled me into investigating whether or not such a series was ever written. Like other sources and documents referred to in the book, it's entirely the figment of the author's marvelously meticulous imagination.) Throughout, Jones's prose--whether bookish, mythical, or Southern colloquial--is pitch-perfect; not a word or expression wasted or out of place. Jones's Manchester County is populated by dozens of plantation owners, slaves, poor folk, freedmen, and children, and his writing animates each and every one of them. There are at least forty characters in his novel (and I didn't find it difficult to keep track of them), but the book's several interlaced stories focus especially on the (dead) Henry Townsend, his widow Caldonia, his overseer Moses, his father Augustus, the local sheriff John Skiffington, and William Robbins, the former owner of the Townsends who allows Augustus to purchase his family's liberty. That Henry blemished his own freedom by purchasing slaves is a source of profound sadness to his mother and father: "Why trouble ourselves with you bein free, Henry? You could not have hurt me more if you had cut off my arms and legs." "I ain't done that any white man wouldn't do. I ain't broke no law." Such passages highlight the moral b

Much has already been said about the basic plot of this book, so I'd like to address the non-linear writing style...imagine yourself as a leaf tumbling down a stream, sometimes hurtling forward, yet frequently caught in little swirling eddies along the edges. If you relax and "go with the flow" rather than expecting this book to read as you would wish, you will find it to be an astounding and seductive experience on several levels.The viewpoint of this book is equally fluid; through some magic, Jones has you seeing life through the eyes of whatever character he's currently focused upon. There are terrible, ugly, beautiful, sad, heartwarming things that happen constantly throughout this book and somehow, you are always identifying through the protagonist of the moment, whether this be a slave or a slave patroller, frightening as that might be. There is no melodrama here. Somehow, everything is just taken for granted, assumed...it is, after all, their known world. And, for a brief time, ours as well. We eventually come to take it for granted.We can look back with the smugness of time and condemn slavery and its consequential perverse social structurings. Yet a book like this makes one question our own "known world," the social structures and cultural practices we take for granted and assume we are powerless to change. I wonder what our descendents will find equally perverse here...probably our oil addiction which forces us to attempt to control countries half-way around the world rather than simply learning to make do with less here at home.Curator, AfroAmericanHeritage dot com

Edward P. Jones tackles a difficult subject with depth and courage. Unlike other reviews listed here, I did not find his prose difficult, but enjoyed its richness and color, and found "The Known World" filled with flawed and genuine people of all races who grapple with slavery-America's "peculiar institution"-in a way that will surprise and compel readers.Mourners come to Manchester County, Virginia to bury Henry Townsend and comfort his widow Caldonia. Henry was only 31 years old, a successful landowner and the owner of 33 slaves. He was also black, and a former slave himself. His human property learned from the start that working for a black master was no different from working for a white-or an Indian, for that matter. But they hold out the tiniest shred of hope that Caldonia, who was born free, will free them.Henry's father Augustus bought his own freedom from his owner, Bill Robbins. He then worked to buy his wife, and then his son. But Henry always felt more affinity with Robbins than he did with his own family, shocking his parents when he buys his first slave. There are a number of black and Cherokee slave owners in the area who look on slaves with perhaps even more dispassionate eyes than do their white neighbors. "The legacy," Henry's mother-in-law calls his slaves when Caldonia briefly considers manumitting them. "Don't throw away the legacy."I have never found a book that looks at slavery like "The Known World" does. Throw your preconceived notions out the window and be prepared to be completely pulled into a world where, no matter the characters' race, nothing is black and white.