The Most Entertaining Chapters Of The Worst Chapters Of Human History

If you don't have or know children there's this cloying kids' show from the Jim Henson empire called Dinosaur Train which basically combines the top two things kids are obsessed with: dinosaurs and trains. It's about a group of animated dinosaurs that either work on or like to ride trains. It's about as crass as can be. The only thing worse would be if they took trains to other planets.

Similarly, Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad combines the best parts of slavery — graphic violence and psychological torment — with actual trains. It's like Ken Burns meets the Lionel-Industrial Complex. Here's hoping that Railroad is never taught to high schoolers, lest they starting thinking the Underground Railroad was a literal subway from Georgia to the North.

It's not that magical realism should be unwelcome when depicting brutal chapters of human history, but it can seem a little wrong. Once, back in the 1990s, I remember cheerfully asking an older colleague if she had seen the quirky, heartwarming Life Is Beautiful. "I didn't need to see it," she tersely answered. At the time, I hadn't realized she was a Holocaust survivor.

Of course you can argue that if you took the choo-choo parts out of Underground, it'd be a straight-up tale of an escaped slave. Sure, but then you start to think about why it's a piece of fiction in the first place. Which is why I think there's a reason 12 Years a Slave exists — same brutal imagery, but being an adaptation of a first-person account it's insulated from this criticism.

At this point I would like to take a minute to humbly announce that I have read Moby Dick — as an adult, in fact — and in proving so, note the similarity between the slavecatcher character in Railroad and Melville's iconic Ahab. In Dick the obsessive was tracking a whale. In Underground, a human. It's provocative. Also weird.

Speaking of ridiculously, unaccountably obvious statements to make, Whitehead has a habit of beating a point to death. Or at least underscoring it twenty times and referring back to it later on, just to make sure you realized it. Kind of like Scorsese's Rat. In Whitehead's case, the line "Look outside as you speed through, and you'll find the true face of America" — because they're in a darkened tunnel, get it? No seriously, do you get it?

Look, I know people are dim. I didn't really think about the line the first time I read it. But why not just let it be? Maybe if it comes up again, or someone smarter mentions it, or a TA blows minds with all manner deep cuts then it could be a nice little moment. Instead it becomes THE FUCKING BIG SYMBOLIC STATEMENT YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOUT THIS UNDERGROUND — NO, LITERALLY UNDERGROUND — TRAIN SYSTEM.

Which is sort of when you start to see Underground as a giant spec script or something. Because, after all, the only thing people love more than human misery is trains, and this thing could have a lot of legs, if only . . . oh wait.

And so when we read Railroad in book club, you know how many people this bothered? Exactly no one. Which goes to show, I suppose . . . but people, really? (I'm saying this to 12 really brilliant, interested readers . . .) No one? Not one of you thinks it's a little weird? And no one does.

So it's clearly just my own hangup. I'll get over it.