“The Match”
by Colson Whitehead
from the April 1, 2019 issue of The New Yorker
I had mixed feelings about Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-Prize winning novel The Underground Railroad. I liked quite a bit of it, but I didn’t followed the experiment to the same depths as others. I think that’s on me; as I’ve read more critical commentary on it, I like it more and more in retrospect. This summer we’ll get his follow-up, The Nickel Boys, from which we get “The Match.” Yes, this is an excerpt, but presumably one that will garner quite a bit of attention. I know I’m curious.
But not quite enough to dig in on a Monday morning. So I’ll put this out there and look forward to your thoughts below. Is this a good story? Does it make you want to read The Nickel Boys?
Also, what are your thoughts on Whitehead in general? I think I need to get to know him better, personally. When I first heard of him, he’d published a couple of novels and was relatively young. But time has passed! The Nickel Boys will be his seventh novel. He’s now been publishing for twenty years, consistently picking up honors and accolades since the beginning. So maybe I should just skip the excerpt and plan on reading the book in July.
A long while back I decided to stop reading the excerpts that The New Yorker publishes instead of short stories unless there was an especially compelling reason to do so. In this case, I have read two of Whitehead’s novels and liked both of them, so I am sufficiently curious about his new book to want to read an excerpt even if it ended up reading like, well, an excerpt. For the most part this excerpt works as a stand-alone piece. We get a clear enough beginning and end with the way the boxing story is told for it to work as a story. If there is one main way it is lacking as a stand-alone story it might be in the role of Elwood and Turner. They are peripheral figures in this story and we don’t really get to know them very well at all, but they are there because they figure more significantly in the overall story of the novel.
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On the whole the excerpt is well written. Anyone who has read his other work will probably find that this is of a similar quality to his other work. My only real criticism of the story is that he seemed to work a bit to hard to create some suspense about what would happen in the fight. On the one hand, he overdoes it a bit with the boys speculating about whether or not Griff understood he was supposed to take a dive or whether or not he remembered he was supposed to take a dive. There was a lot more than needed there to create doubt. But on the other hand I’m not sure why he felt the need to create doubt at all. Why not have it seem clear that Griff was going to take a dive as ordered and then let it be a surprise first when he doesn’t and second when we find out the real reason he didn’t do it? The discussion of what it meant to the boys that Griff was going to take a dive was more interesting than the speculation about whether he would anyway.
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The excerpt makes me interested enough to want to read the novel, but there is one concern I have about the book. There is nothing new about stories about prisons and the kinds of brutality and injustice that go on in them. So I hope that Whitehead has more in store for us than just a book that says that prisons are horrible places where terrible people do awful things. I don’t really see anything in the excerpt that says he does have something more than that to offer, but I remain hopeful. For now.
Smooth writing, sure enough. However, I don’t buy the twist. maybe a person will be dumb enough not to be able to add 2+3, but no person who has boxed will mistake the third round for the second., Any athlete who has done his profession for a while will have an innate sense of time (think of how often you have seen a quarterback take the snap with one second remaining) and how long the contest has gone.
Also, for a character to be taken “:out back” and whipped to death for a math mistake demeans the whole tone of the story and turns the cruelty of the white overseers into a joke.
“Fifty Grand” is still the champ in this line of boxing stories.
In baseball it happens from time to time that a fielder will catch a fly ball then slowly trot in heading to the dugout only to have to be told there are only two outs, not three. Sometimes those lapses allow runners to advance or even score. Outfielders have sometimes even thrown the ball into the stands not realizing there are three outs, costing their team a run. Counting to three can be hard sometimes, even for top professional athletes.
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As for the whipping him to death, I am betting that Whitehead in his research came across stories just like that.
im sure that whipping to death happened. And maybe the miscount happened just as you said. It still trivialized the cruelty and the boy’s death.
They weren’t upset at a math mistake or even that the white boy lost. They were upset because they fixed the fight and they—or at least the fat cat that angrily accosted Spencer—wagered a lot of money on it. It’s not trivial in the least, in my opinion. They brutally killed black boys for much less.
This is so weird:
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/27-possible-graves-found-near-notorious-florida-reform-school/ar-BBVRcCT?li=BBnb7Kz&OCID=AVRES007
Kevin is spot on. They lost a lot of money and took out their fury on the victim, who very easily could have made that mistake, given what we’ve learned about him. William, the MSN article isn’t “weird”, it’s the cruel reality of our history and very likely part of the research Whitehead did for his book. As for the literary aspects of the story, I find the author skilled: I’d not heard of him, so I didn’t know this was an excerpt. Still, I found the story stood well on its own and drew me in, although I cringed and winced along the way. I don’t have the strength to read the novel, particularly after the news story, yet I’ll recognise Whitehead as a quality author worth reading and recommending to others.