Esi Edugyan

Esi Edugyan's novel Washington Black (2018) may not be typical of anything but through the first third of so at least it hold up as a fine and eventful "novel of education." What I mean by that: Many similar novels and in particular novels about escape from traumatic childhood and in particular about escape from slavery attain part of their drama and success because they present not only a story (often first-person) about an individual's life but also a representative story about the lives of many. EE's novel - about a young man born into slavery on a Caribbean sugar plantation in the early 19th century - seems much more the story of a unique individual - highly skilled as a self-taught artist, highly observant and insightful (this is a first person narrative richness topical detail and social observation). Though we see in this novel some of the harsh and sadistic conditions of slave life on a plantation, that does not seem to be the central purpose of this work. We are presented w the life story of one who is exceptional, not typical- and a narrative in which the protagonist/narrator does not break for freedom but in which he is more or less adopted as a protégée by the plantation owner's intellectual younger brother - one who is repulsed by plantation life yet finds himself inextricably tied to the system. Much of the first third of the novel concerns the brother's bizarre attempt to design, bios, and launch a hot-air balloon - and how this obsession depends whether he likes it or not on slave labor and nearly costs the narrator his life.

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