Mat Johnson’s novel Pym is impossible to describe without sounding like you’re making it up as you go along.  It’s a literary mystery/antarctic thriller/art scene satire that doubles as scathing social commentary.  With giant yeti-like creatures and Edgar Allen Poe.  And it’s really, really good.

 

The novel begins on the campus of a Eastern liberal arts college.  Chris Jaynes finds himself out of a job as the school’s professor of African-American Literature and only black professor.  Chafing in the role of “blackademic” and “Professional Negro”, Jaynes refuses to join the school’s Diversity Committee (thereby robbing it of its diversity).  When he begins to teach early American literature, with a focus on Edgar Allen Poe, he is denied tenure and shown the door.  Jaynes defends his work exploring the work of Poe:

You want to understand Whiteness, as a pathology and a mindset, you have to look at the source of its assumptions…To truly understand evolution, Darwin couldn’t just stare at dead finches. No, he studied animals in their embryonic form…That’s why Poe’s work mattered. It offered passage on a vessel bound for the primal American subconscious, the foundation on which all our visible systems and structures were built.

Jaynes is particularly obsessed with Poe’s only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, a strange and not particularly good novel full of self-conflicting and dead-end elements.  The novel tells the story of a white whaler (Pym) and a black sailor, Dirk Peters, who alternately denies and embraces his race opportunistically over the course of the novel:

Dirk Peters was an Uncle Tom.  This was a particularly impressive achievement, considering Uncle Tom’s Cabin had not yet been written. But Peters managed it anyway.

They two men are the only survivors of an attack by a black tribe on an island off Antarctica.  They escape only to be greeted by a large white monster upon their arrival on the Continent itself.  Then Poe’s novel abruptly ends. Jaynes interest in the novel becomes a full blown obsession when his antiquarian book dealer shows up with a strange narrative or possible early novel by an unknown black author – Dirk Peters.

Jaynes becomes convinced that the Peters narrative corroborates the events in Poe’s novel, which he now believes is not a novel at all. Armed with a large cash settlement from his dismissal from the university, Jaynes assembles and finances an all-black crew for his own exploration of the Antarctic to see if he can find the mysterious black islanders of the deep southern latitudes and resolve the tale of the white monster. Then things get weird.

The crew encounters Poe’s huge humanoid beasts (or “giant snow honkies” according to one crew member) and a reclusive millionaire artist, a very thinly disguised Thomas Kincaid, “the artist of light.”  The crew’s adventures serve as a backdrop for Johnson to explore the themes of race and identity.  Johnson’s sharp wit, ironic distancing, and gripping story help to soften the blows of what is  a serious and deeply biting satire of racial conflict and self-identity in quote unquote post-racial America.

Post Script: Mat Johnson’s previous work was the critically well-regarded graphic novel Incognegro about a light-skinned black northern reporter who “passes” in the south to report on and expose lynchings.  The Best Damn Writing Blog recently named Johnson as one of the Top 25 Most Influential Black Fiction Writers on Twitter. Ironically, one Twitter user recently had this so say: “PYM by Mat Johnson. Um, a white guy wrote this? I feel uncomfortable.”

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