Pym: A Novel (Mat Johnson)

Mat Johnson’s Pym: A Novel (Spiegel & Grau, 2011) revisits Edgar Allan Poe’s only novel: the incredibly weird Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. This novel is no less weird, but a lot funnier.

Denied tenure for refusing to serve on his college’s Diversity Committee, African American Literature professor Christopher Jaynes stumbles on a previously unknown slave narrative that seems to confirm Poe’s fictional account of an unlikely paradise in the midst of the African Diaspora: a tropical island in the Antarctic where black people live free. Smelling fame, freedom, and the revival of his academic career, Jaynes procures a ship (the Creole), and assembles an all African-American crew: his ship-captain cousin (a foremer civil rights activist), two lawyers (who happen also to be the love of his life and her second husband), two gay engineers/extreme bloggers, and his childhood best friend: a laid-off Detroit bus driver who loves Little Debbie snack cakes and the twee, sentimental paintings of “Thomas Carvel, the Master of Light.”

But what begins as a quest for a black people’s utopia turns swiftly into an expedition into the Antarctic Heart of Whiteness, a region secretly populated by colossal, brutal, whiter-than-white natives (“super ice honkies” one of his companions dubs them). Johnson tweaks Conrad and Poe, and references Jules Verne and H.P. Lovecraft along the way. The protagonist of the original novel, Arthur Gordon Pym, makes an appearance as well.

Johnson’s work is fierce and funny satire. It’s more than parody of expedition literature, and not only a set of sly inside-reference puzzles for literati. It is also a serious meditation on racial identity and on the danger of falling prey to our own fictions.

[NOTE: this review was written as research for Ms. Mentor's column in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The link to the CHR piece is here.]