On Top of the World

By Lev Grossman Sunday, Apr. 11, 2004
    • When Edward Jones was 10, he used to go to the public library in Washington, but not for the books. "We would go into the boys' room," he remembers. "We would take off our shoes and lay on the floor and put our feet up on the radiators to get warm." Jones is again sitting in the lobby of that building, but the library is now the City Museum of Washington, and Jones is 53 and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his first novel, The Known World (Amistad; 388 pages). Time does have a way of changing everything.

    Everything — and nothing. "I always thought one day I would write a story," says Jones, a shy, round-shouldered man with a sly, infectious smile. "The first line is, 'You never get over having been a child.'" He laughs, but there's still hurt there. Jones had a tough childhood: his father wasn't around, and his mother washed dishes and scrubbed floors to support him and his sister and brother, who is disabled. His mother never learned to read, and they moved 18 times in 18 years. Once a landlord took the windows out of their frames when his mother didn't pay the rent. "I think in a certain sense you do what you were born to do," he says. "And maybe, maybe, I was born to write. But I was also born poor."


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    Jones went to college — Holy Cross, a Jesuit school in Massachusetts — but poverty was always one false step away, and he was briefly homeless after he graduated. When he was offered a steady job at a financial magazine called Tax Notes, he took it, and stayed there for 19 years. "When you grow up like that, having a job is important," he says. "It was always the job first. Writing would come second." But Jones hung on to his literary dreams, even though his co-workers joshed him about writing the great American novel. He lived alone, in the same apartment, watching TV — he's addicted to Judge Judy — thinking and writing.

    In 1992 Jones published a collection of stories called Lost in the City, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award, and he started thinking about doing a novel. He was haunted by something he had learned in college: Before the Civil War, some free blacks in the South owned slaves. He turned this fact over in his mind for almost 10 years, mentally charting out his fictional territory and populating it with characters. "I'd be thinking it through as I was living my life," he remembers. "I'm on the bus, I'm walking up and down the aisles of Safeway, you know? I'm sitting watching TV, and a thought will come to me." By Christmas 2001 he was finally ready to write. He sat down at his computer — a loaner from his office — and poured out the entire book in seven months flat.

    The Known World is set in fictional Manchester County, Va., in 1855. Its center post is the life and death of Henry Townsend, a black man, born a slave, who gains his freedom and becomes a slave master himself. How, the book asks, could a black man make another black man his property? Jones circles his subject warily rather than charging straight at it: the novel begins with Henry's death, then loops around to follow him from childhood. We meet Henry's former owner, who became his mentor, and his father, a good, dignified man who is horrified at what his son has become. We meet many of Henry's 33 slaves, including Moses, his moody, brooding overseer: "Moses had thought that it was already a strange world that made him a slave to a white man, but God had indeed set it twirling and twisting every which way when he put black people to owning their own kind."

    Jones explores Henry's life from every possible angle, restlessly following minor characters through love stories, comedies and epic quests, skipping across decades of time and continents of space — The Known World is a glorious, enthralling, tangled root ball of a book — but always returning to the story's tragic core. Slowly, terrifyingly, it dawns on us that although Henry has his free papers, he's the product of an evil world, and his soul will never be free. When it was published last summer, Jones' book seemed like a very mature first novel. With the benefit of eight months' reflection, we can say that The Known World is a masterpiece that deserves a place in the American literary canon.

    It's strange and wonderful that a book of such deep human understanding could be written by a man who lives alone, who until last year had never even left the country. But Jones is a man on whom little is lost, and he has seen enough to know a few things about humans: that history makes us do terrible things and that we can rise above history to change the world we know into something better. "They're all people of their time, in a certain way," Jones says of his characters. "We all are. And here and there a few people stand up and say, 'No!'"