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lagobond's review
3.0
This book is like your standard case of domestic violence, in that it follows a predictable pattern of intoxicating highs and punishing lows. It's messy and sometimes downright toilsome to read. With depressing regularity, I'd decide to leave the relationship stop reading. But every time I did, just like flowers and solicitous displays of affection from an abuser, something rewarding came along that kept me wanting more.
Oh yes, Charles R. Johnson can write, but he can painfully ramble too. (I will say I'm curious to see what he wrote later in life.) There are fascinating, grotesquely comical scenes that had me shaking my head in horrified amusement. (The opening scene; the veterinarian's life assurance list.) There's some information about the slavery-era South that I was not familiar with; lots of interesting vocabulary too. There were brilliantly written bits of insight which would have worked well had there been more prelude, but which felt random and meta because they came at the wrong point in the story. There were promising avenues of storytelling that the writer promised to let me wander, only to immediately pull me down some dark, dead-end alley instead.
The entire character of Ezekiel didn't work for me at all. He plainly just served as a vehicle to introduce Buddhist thinking into the story, and to give Andrew Hawkins access to education; however he felt pasted-on and wooden, and frankly was a total bore. The main thing to be said for Ezekiel is that the overly dramatic/romantic descriptions of him, all the way to the end, would have fit into any novel actually written in the 19th century. Hard to believe he wasn't created until around 1980.
The story here is outlandish and yet I am willing to suspend disbelief, because as we know, slavery defies logic and people do strange things, and who am I to say that a journey like Andrew Hakwins' could not have happened. And it's fiction, yes? But it's fiction aspiring to tell a true story of sorts, fiction aiming to show a deeply human experience of the kind which should horrify and disgust any normal person. And certainly there are aspects of it that feel true, but somehow the whole thing is (if we can believe the main character) horrifying and disgusting only in theory. I just can't connect with this narrator!
Johnson shows glimpses of people's lives that let us see things we don't normally see. He draws enlightened parallels between the oppression of black people and women. He tells a story that made me want to know what happens next, and he tells it well when he sticks with the events. He creates truly memorable characters and conversations. This is good stuff, but then he gets lost in endless philosophical ruminations, told in tortured sentences that don't really ring true, and don't serve a purpose, and made me want to a) go to sleep or b) stab my eyeballs with a fork. There are detours in the story that should have been cut (what's up with the Marx/Althea chapter?). Bits of the story are told out of order, and not in a planned way. Did the editor fall asleep, too?!
This book wants to be everything at once, and in the end it's neither here or there. It's a mix of slavery fiction and nonfiction, adventure story, Bildungsroman, seemingly drug-fueled philosophical/moral/religious treatise which oscillates between astuteness and youthful navel-gazing, social commentary (both historical and modern), with a little harlequin romance, a sprinkling of breathtaking sex and a few very quotable bits thrown in. But the parts don't make a whole. The characters are flat and their actions not credible. How is Andrew so very detached the entire time? He's an observer more than a protagonist; he watches and explains and theorizes, but even in the worst depths of his young life, his emotions remain written and read rather than felt. And by the way, some of the information is factually wrong and should have been researched properly, like the pellagra stuff.
3 stars only because I did finish the entire thing, even though I had to jump from page 87 to page 154, finish the end, and then go back to the part I had skipped. It was the only way I could keep myself from giving up at a point when my reading seemed as pointless as Ezekiel's existence.
Oh yes, Charles R. Johnson can write, but he can painfully ramble too. (I will say I'm curious to see what he wrote later in life.) There are fascinating, grotesquely comical scenes that had me shaking my head in horrified amusement. (The opening scene; the veterinarian's life assurance list.) There's some information about the slavery-era South that I was not familiar with; lots of interesting vocabulary too. There were brilliantly written bits of insight which would have worked well had there been more prelude, but which felt random and meta because they came at the wrong point in the story. There were promising avenues of storytelling that the writer promised to let me wander, only to immediately pull me down some dark, dead-end alley instead.
The entire character of Ezekiel didn't work for me at all. He plainly just served as a vehicle to introduce Buddhist thinking into the story, and to give Andrew Hawkins access to education; however he felt pasted-on and wooden, and frankly was a total bore. The main thing to be said for Ezekiel is that the overly dramatic/romantic descriptions of him, all the way to the end, would have fit into any novel actually written in the 19th century. Hard to believe he wasn't created until around 1980.
The story here is outlandish and yet I am willing to suspend disbelief, because as we know, slavery defies logic and people do strange things, and who am I to say that a journey like Andrew Hakwins' could not have happened. And it's fiction, yes? But it's fiction aspiring to tell a true story of sorts, fiction aiming to show a deeply human experience of the kind which should horrify and disgust any normal person. And certainly there are aspects of it that feel true, but somehow the whole thing is (if we can believe the main character) horrifying and disgusting only in theory. I just can't connect with this narrator!
Johnson shows glimpses of people's lives that let us see things we don't normally see. He draws enlightened parallels between the oppression of black people and women. He tells a story that made me want to know what happens next, and he tells it well when he sticks with the events. He creates truly memorable characters and conversations. This is good stuff, but then he gets lost in endless philosophical ruminations, told in tortured sentences that don't really ring true, and don't serve a purpose, and made me want to a) go to sleep or b) stab my eyeballs with a fork. There are detours in the story that should have been cut (what's up with the Marx/Althea chapter?). Bits of the story are told out of order, and not in a planned way. Did the editor fall asleep, too?!
This book wants to be everything at once, and in the end it's neither here or there. It's a mix of slavery fiction and nonfiction, adventure story, Bildungsroman, seemingly drug-fueled philosophical/moral/religious treatise which oscillates between astuteness and youthful navel-gazing, social commentary (both historical and modern), with a little harlequin romance, a sprinkling of breathtaking sex and a few very quotable bits thrown in. But the parts don't make a whole. The characters are flat and their actions not credible. How is Andrew so very detached the entire time? He's an observer more than a protagonist; he watches and explains and theorizes, but even in the worst depths of his young life, his emotions remain written and read rather than felt. And by the way, some of the information is factually wrong and should have been researched properly, like the pellagra stuff.
3 stars only because I did finish the entire thing, even though I had to jump from page 87 to page 154, finish the end, and then go back to the part I had skipped. It was the only way I could keep myself from giving up at a point when my reading seemed as pointless as Ezekiel's existence.
sdc's review
4.0
What a terrific, inventive novel. I'm hard-pressed to think of a time I was more dazzled by a book at the sentence level. Structured in the tradition of a slave narrative, it chronicles the flight to freedom of Andrew, his sexual adventures, not to mention his origin story, which caused a few ripples of controversy when this was first published in the 1980s. The story takes place in an area I know well--Upstate South Carolina--during the years before the Civil War, so it had my attention from the first page. It moves from Abbeville, to Greenville and concludes in Spartanburg, though I'm not sure what connection, if any, Johnson has to the Palmetto State.
Johnson has written at length about philosophy and he works in a multitude of references to Kant and other great thinkers. The flights of fancy--I'm reluctant to call them examples of magical realism--come rapidly and aren't always successful. Johnson is a master of the simile and I grinned when he broke the fourth wall. But an appearance by Karl Marx in the middle-third took me out of the novel. There aren't an abundance of characters, but Johnson uses multiple names for each and at times it was a challenge to keep up with who he was referring to, especially after they returned from a 50-plus page absence.
I think this would be interesting to pair with Colson Whitehead's Underground Railroad or maybe even Beloved by Toni Morrison. On its own, Oxherding Tale is a rewarding and accomplished piece of work.
Johnson has written at length about philosophy and he works in a multitude of references to Kant and other great thinkers. The flights of fancy--I'm reluctant to call them examples of magical realism--come rapidly and aren't always successful. Johnson is a master of the simile and I grinned when he broke the fourth wall. But an appearance by Karl Marx in the middle-third took me out of the novel. There aren't an abundance of characters, but Johnson uses multiple names for each and at times it was a challenge to keep up with who he was referring to, especially after they returned from a 50-plus page absence.
I think this would be interesting to pair with Colson Whitehead's Underground Railroad or maybe even Beloved by Toni Morrison. On its own, Oxherding Tale is a rewarding and accomplished piece of work.
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