Staff Picks: Phillips, February, and Fake News
A banner depicting Joice Heth, by the artist Mark Copeland.
When a review copy of Kevin Young’s landed on my desk, I turned to Nadja and said, This book is going to win the Pulitzer Prize. is a barefisted reckoning with American culture, an extension of sorts of Young’s whip-smart book-length essay that coils, swerves, and diverts out at right angles from itself. It begins with a seemingly benign look at Joice Heth, a black woman whom P. T. Barnum added to his sideshow and claimed to be the 161-year-old nursing maid of George Washington. The question is, Was Heth in on it? Was she paid for this? And even if she was, was Barnum’s humbug—something designed to deceive and mislead—essentially a co-opting of black pain and suffering? How does that change when we discover that Barnum actually her from another showman? Young’s inquiry spins out from there and looks at the outrageous headlines of nineteenth-century penny papers, fake memoirs, false reporting, and the unmistakable Americanness of the hoax—which is essentially a performance, one the viewer willfully participates in, as disingenuous as it is. Young is a pure essayist in the vein of was long-listed for the National Book Award for Nonfiction and is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. I stand by my prediction of Young’s Pulitzer, and am taking bets.
