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| | Salon.com Books | "John Henry Days" |
 | | For one, there's Whitehead's hulking talent, the potential of which buzzed through "The Intuitionist" with the voltage of a city power line; for another, there's the novel's outsize subject matter, which is more or less America, the epic idea of which Whitehead chases with the dogged ambition of a Lawrence or DeLillo. |
 | | Whitehead, a former television critic for the Village Voice, brings a serrated wit to his depiction of the junketeering life; his wickedly precise portrayal of a Manhattan publishing party -- with its clinking glasses and banal, disjointed chatter -- shudders with a grandly satiric frisson. |
 | | But Whitehead, pendulating between John Henry's feats and J.'s, never once settles for an easy, false nostalgia; hero and hack walk side by side through their paralleled worlds, equals in their fight against their respective mountains. |
| archive.salon.com /books/review/2001/05/11/whitehead/index.html (740 words) |
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