Pulitzer-winning fictionist Edward P. Jones visits the Philippines
by Tina Cuyugan
In 2003, the American literary world was astounded by the appearance of The Known World, a novel about 19th-century slavery, in particular about African-Americans who themselves owned slaves.
Its middle-aged author, Edward P. Jones, had drawn the attention of a handful of reviewers ten years earlier with a collection of short stories, after which almost nothing had been heard of him.
It turns out that for most of that decade, Jones had been fashioning—in his head, hardly putting a word on paper—one of the most poetic and richly realized American historical novels of recent times.
The Known World explores, movingly and relentlessly, the terrible implications of a human being owned by another.
Accolades and prizes quickly followed its publication, including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The novelist Peter Matthiessen described it as “a strong, intricate, daring book by a writer of deep compassion and uncommon gifts.”
Jones, who is in the Philippines for the 2nd Manila International Literary Festival, turns out to be a courtly, self-contained man who lights up when speaking of his imaginative world and the craft of writing.
He was brought up in Washington , D.C. , by a working single mother whose hard life ended before her son’s literary success came to pass.
“We moved house 18 times in 18 years,” he recalls of his early life. The Known World is dedicated to his brother and to his mother Jeanette “who could have done much more in a better world.”
Although he insists that all his characters are fiction, his two extraordinary collections of short stories of the modern era, Lost In the City (1992) and All Aunt Hagar’s Children (2006), are set in readily identifiable streets in Washington , D.C.
This is not the federal Washington of gleaming public buildings, but of largely African-American districts that grew from the successive waves of migrants from the rural south.
Like many Filipino probinsiyanos, or their parents, who have made their way to Manila nursing hopes of a better life, but instead have found themselves barely able to survive, the characters in these stories lead lives “of quiet desperation,” as Jones says, taking a line from Thoreau.
Within this world, a minute wrong decision or seemingly inconsequential twist of fate can unravel lives and loves beyond repair, setting off a chain reaction that cuts through generations.
In “A Rich Man,” a pensioned widower’s flirtation with a younger woman leads to a downward spiral of drugs and degradation. In “The Store,” a shop owner who provides refuge and a rare and unsentimental love to an angry young man she hires as a clerk is ostracized by the community after accidentally running over a little girl.
“I don’t do happy well,” says Jones, dryly, when asked about the bleak fate that befalls many of his characters and their loves.
In the hands of a lesser writer, it would be all too grim, but Jones’ mastery of his imagined world, his delicacy of perception and language, and his fierce empathy imbue these small, messy and fleeting lives with resonance and poignancy.
As a teenager, Jones had a vague idea he wanted “to work in the Post Office, something like that.” But like almost all good writers, he was a first a reader, and was drawn to American southern fictionists whose books spoke directly to his experience. This was followed by the notion of becoming a writer himself.
A college course on the Bible as literature was also a revelation; it taught him, among other things, the impact of using pared-down, sonorous language to describe horrific events.
Despite being an author with prizes to his name and an international following, Jones leads a hermetic existence, apparently not very different from the two decades he spent earning a living as the editor of an obscure newsletter—now defunct—for accountants.
“I sit on the floor, I sleep on the floor,” Jones says. He does watch movies and news (and recalls following accounts of our late president, Corazon Aquino). He doesn’t do Facebook.
He has grown accustomed to interviews and making public appearances when necessary, and has taught creative writing, but one has a strong sense that the only world that truly engages him is the one that continues to evolve in his amazing imagination.
Jones, who is visiting the Philippines under the auspices of the U.S. Embassy, has been meeting with local writers at universities in Manila and Dumaguete City .
He will hold a book signing at National Bookstore and speak at the 2nd Manila International Literary Festival at the Ayala Museum , Makati , November 16-18, along with Junot Diaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Details at www.manilaliteraryfestival.com. ###
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