Alphonse Miggs sits in the Social Room of the Millhouse Inn, he sits on his hands at a table of eight, with seven folks he doesn't know. At the start of the evening his knuckles brushed against a lump in his jacket pocket. He withdrew a mothball and, supremely embarrassed, thrust it back where it came. He wasn't sure if anyone noticed his mark of shame. For the rest of the night he felt cursed with invisible pockets and all at the dinner can see his shame, the great pearl of napthalene clinging to his person, smell the fumes of social incompetence emanating from it.
Invisible pockets! Fumes of social incompetence! Apparently Alphonse Miggs has been raiding the closets of my nightmares. Miggs appears in Colson Whitehead's second novel, John Henry Days, which I am just now getting around to reading although it was published five years ago. I loved The Intuitionist and I've put Apex Hides the Hurt on my Christmas wish list, hoping that Whitehead can live up to the promise of his first book.
His second book, John Henry Days, is delightful, certainly more coherent than reviews led me to expect. Its quirky cast of journalists on a junket includes one J. Sutter, described as an "inveigler of invites and slayer of crudites, this drink ticket fondler and slim tipper, open bar opportunist, master of vouchers, queue-jumping wrangler of receipts." Sutter ventures into West Virginia for the unveiling of a new postage stamp commemorating John Henry, and there he encounters the aforementioned Alphonse Miggs, who at the moment seems to be on the verge of going postal, but I'm only 80 pages in so what do I know?
Well, I do know one thing: wherever Alphonse Miggs gets his clothes, I'm not shopping there.
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