Double the Pleasure

Double the fun.

A busy week here at Zero to Well-Read HQ.

We all know The Odyssey excitement is mostly about Christopher Nolan, and that’s fine. It’s good, actually. People getting hyped to spend time and money engaging with real art made by humans is good, and it’s a blast when the event approaches the monoculture vibes of the late ‘90s.

Listening to people chat in line before the screening I attended last Thursday healed something in me. In front of me, a pack of floppy-haired college bros competed to see who could remember more of the big Odyssey set pieces: “Okay, there’s the Cyclops and the sirens and…what’s the whirlpool’s name, again?” Behind me, a different pack of floppy-haired college bros talked about how this would their first time seeing a movie in a packed theater (we used to be a proper country) and lamented that they hadn’t read the book first.

On the way out after the show, the couple behind me debated Athena’s role in the story while yet another pack of college bros wondered how closely the movie followed the book. You know I didn’t pause before turning around to tell him it was actually very faithful and that the book is a lot more approachable than people think. I like to think he went home and started reading, contributing to the 76% increase in sales of The Odyssey so far this year.

It’s always exciting when the biggest movie of the year is based on a book, but there’s something really special about folks flocking to a 3,000-year-old epic poem that many of us suffered through when we first encountered it. Collective enthusiasm about art made by a person working at the height of his powers is about as good as it gets.

Which brings me to our regularly scheduled programming for the week, Colson Whitehead’s gobsmacking 2016 experiment with speculative historical fiction, The Underground Railroad. (How’s that for a segue?)

It’s a great conceit: what if the Underground Railroad were an actual system of trains running under the American South? But a conceit will only get you so far, as Yesteryear recently reminded me. Great art requires both ideas and the ability to execute on them, and Whitehead has the stuff. He knows the conceit is just the entry point, a way to use imagination and surrealism to expand our understanding of and connection to very real, very painful history.

Whitehead is my #1 draft pick for best living American novelist, a spot he’s held in my heart since Toni Morrison’s death in 2019, and he’s got the bona fides to back it up. His 2000 debut The Intuitionist was shortlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award. His 2001 follow-up John Henry Days was a finalist for the Pulitzer. He received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, colloquially known as the “genius grant,” in 2002. It’s the kind of reputation-cementing run that would be a capstone to most writers’ careers, and Whitehead was just getting started.

When The Underground Railroad won both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, just the eighth novel to ever take home both of American publishing’s biggest trophies, Whitehead joined the most elite ranks of American letters. Then he joined an even smaller club in 2020 when The Nickel Boys won the Pulitzer, making him one of only four authors to win the Fiction prize twice. (Faulkner, Updike, and Booth Tarkington are the other three—incredible company for Tarkington, about whom I can tell you precisely zero things.)

There’s no telling what will stand the test of time, and a look at the bestsellers and prize-winning titles from just a few decades ago is a sobering reminder that the smartest bet on any book is that it will be forgotten. But Underground Railroad, and Whitehead’s career in general, feel different. Both timely and timeless, innovative and technically accomplished in the traditional sense, concerned with the most enduring questions of American life and capable of asking them in profound new ways.

As if it weren’t enough just to get to talk about one of our oldest classics alongside a modern masterpiece, there are nods to Homer through Whitehead’s work. The great books are in conversation with each other. What a gift to get to be in conversation with them.