The Atlantic‘s Ta-Nehisi Coates has won the National Book Award for Between the World and Me.
The New York Times, in reporting on the awards, called it “a visceral, blunt exploration of his experience of being a black man in America, which was published this summer in the middle of a national dialogue about race relations and inequality…” and that Coates “won comparisons to the work of James Baldwin.”
For readers who may have missed Christopher Caldwell’s WEEKLY STANDARD feature on Coates, his book, and recent essays, here are a few choice excerpts:
For decades, several books every publishing season have promised an “authentic” account of the experience of being black in America. But the 39-year-old Coates, a Baltimore native, has struck it very big. We learn from New York magazine that he even shows up late for meetings with the president. Coates claims as his model a classic of the black autobiographical genre, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963). It is not immediately clear, though, what distinguishes Coates’s effort from the heap of less distinguished books written in Baldwin’s wake. To figure this out one must look at “The Case for Reparations,” a 16,000-word essay Coates wrote for the Atlantic last year, which won him a wide Internet following. The article makes no explicit “case” that someone should pay today’s blacks for the mistreatment of yesterday’s. The case gets made by implication, through a thumbnail history of American slavery, the racial prejudice that underlay it, and the inequality and injustice that survived it.
…
This book is short, simple, monomaniacal, and punchy. That can be a plus. “Visceral” and “direct” are two perfectly appropriate adjectives that have been much conferred. And yet, critics have felt the need to praise the book for the very virtues in which it is most obviously deficient. Jack Hamilton, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia, writes in Slate: “Coates is more teacher than preacher, a polymath whose breadth of knowledge on matters ranging from literature to pop culture to French philosophy to the Civil War bleeds through every page of his book, distilled into profound moments of discovery, immensely erudite but never showy.” Not a word of this is true. Coates may well possess this knowledge privately, and there are signs of it in his reparations article, but it is wholly absent from his book. What Civil War? The two pages describing battlefields he toured with his son after page 99? What French philosophy? Coates mentions Sartre and Camus once, on page 122, but only to say he’s never read them. Coates himself, while he professes a love of books and learning, makes no claim to erudition, “immense” or otherwise.
In general, black writers have been more balanced in their assessment of the book. The linguist John McWhorter, for instance, who is one of the rare American commentators of any race who actually can lay claim to a broad erudition, was taken aback by the “almost tearfully ardent praise” for Coates’s reparations piece. McWhorter dismissed one of Coates’s more exuberant fans as having written “the kind of thing one formerly said of the Greatest Story Ever Told,” and described Coates as fulfilling the role of a priest in some new religion of antiracism.
…
This book is short, simple, monomaniacal, and punchy. That can be a plus. “Visceral” and “direct” are two perfectly appropriate adjectives that have been much conferred. And yet, critics have felt the need to praise the book for the very virtues in which it is most obviously deficient. Jack Hamilton, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia, writes in Slate: “Coates is more teacher than preacher, a polymath whose breadth of knowledge on matters ranging from literature to pop culture to French philosophy to the Civil War bleeds through every page of his book, distilled into profound moments of discovery, immensely erudite but never showy.” Not a word of this is true. Coates may well possess this knowledge privately, and there are signs of it in his reparations article, but it is wholly absent from his book. What Civil War? The two pages describing battlefields he toured with his son after page 99? What French philosophy? Coates mentions Sartre and Camus once, on page 122, but only to say he’s never read them. Coates himself, while he professes a love of books and learning, makes no claim to erudition, “immense” or otherwise.
In general, black writers have been more balanced in their assessment of the book. The linguist John McWhorter, for instance, who is one of the rare American commentators of any race who actually can lay claim to a broad erudition, was taken aback by the “almost tearfully ardent praise” for Coates’s reparations piece. McWhorter dismissed one of Coates’s more exuberant fans as having written “the kind of thing one formerly said of the Greatest Story Ever Told,” and described Coates as fulfilling the role of a priest in some new religion of antiracism.
Read the entirety of Caldwell’s piece here.
