The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead — A Review

I do not know how to talk about this book without sounding like I am warning you about something. Which I suppose I am. This book is hard to read. Not in the way that dense prose is hard to read, or a complicated plot is hard to follow. Hard in the way that knowing you are going to keep turning the pages even when every page costs you something.

Cora is the reason I stayed. She is not a character in the way some protagonists feel like characters. She is a person who was made to exist in the margins of other peoples decisions, and then Colson Whitehead drops you into her world and says, here, carry this for a while. And you do. You carry it.

The underground railroad in this book is not a metaphor. It is actual trains and actual stations and actual people who choose to help or choose not to. That choice, rendered physical, is one of the most devastating creative decisions I have encountered in fiction. Because you start to understand that the difference between a station and a trap is one decision made by one person, and there is no way to know which one it is until you are already inside.

There were stretches where I read and then sat with it for a day before continuing. Not because the writing was slow but because the experience of being inside the story was heavy in a way I was not always prepared for. And then I would pick it back up and pick up where Cora was, because by that point she had become someone I was not willing to abandon, even in a book.

Whitehead does something here that is difficult to name. He takes the worst of American history and makes it feel present without exploiting it. There is no distance in his prose that lets you off the hook. You are there. You are in the Georgia heat and the North Carolina fear and wherever Cora ends up next, and none of it is comfortable, and all of it matters.

Cora survives in ways that are hard-won and incomplete and not always the way you want her to. I will not spoil what happens. But I will say that by the end, I was genuinely asking for her to make it, not as a reader who wants a happy ending, but as a person who had spent three hundred pages in her company and did not want to leave her in the place the book left her. That is the rarest thing a story can do.

Read it. Then put it down for a day. Then think about it for a long time after that.