ta nehisi coates the water dancer review

Apart from the obvious point it makes-remembering one’s ancestors, no matter how painful, is the key to one’s strength, the key to freedom-it is mostly a distraction.

In The Water Dancer, the purpose of Hiram’s super-power is less clear. The novel’s publicists have made much of the fact that Toni Morrison’s work inspired Coates’s novel.But The Water Dancer has far more in common with Octavia Butler’s Kindred, another plantation novel that, like The Water Dancer, features a science fiction element. If Hiram’s awareness that freedom is meaningless without family is one, then Coates’s refusal to cast his black characters as simple heroes or victims is another. The novel is at its best when Coates is excavating.subtler truths. On its surface, is a traditional resistance narrative. It’s more interested in movement than in the intensities of sustained perception. Where his nonfiction runs narrow and quite deep, The Water Dancer mostly runs wide and fairly shallow. Coates’s novel sometimes feels as if it were written quickly, and it has the virtues and defects of that apparent spontaneity.

The most urgent sections of this ambitious novel are, for this reader, its more grounded ones. One of achievements in this novel is to closely underscore the human particularity of a range of enslaved men and women. Here the effect is more diffuse, and something intangible goes missing. In his earlier books each paragraph felt like a bouillon cube that could be used to brew six other essays. The ride is bracing, even if one sometimes misses the grainy and intense intellection of his nonfiction writing. Coates writes as if he’s thrown his readers into a carriage and is hurtling them through the woods. The Water Dancer is a jeroboam of a book, a crowd-pleasing exercise in breakneck and often occult storytelling that tonally resembles the work of Stephen King as much as it does the work of Toni Morrison, Colson Whitehead and the touchstone African-American science-fiction writer Octavia Butler. This isn’t a typical first novel, if by 'typical first novel' we mean a minor-chord and semi-autobiographical nibbling expedition around the margins of a life. The most surprising thing about The Water Dancer may be its unambiguous narrative ambition.

Ta nehisi coates the water dancer review