Jones boldly flouts a basic convention of storytelling by systematically revealing the fates of his unknowing characters. We find out that one slave will ultimately die 10 feet from where he’s standing, and that a white woman will breathe her last with a knife under her pillow, in terror of an ex-slave whom she’d begged to stay on after the war.
But the best, most counterintuitive idea in “The Known World” turns out to be the greatest disappointment. The human mystery that drives the narrative is the question of how a freed man could own another, and Jones never quite solves the puzzle of Henry’s odd spiritual kinship with his former master. We learn that Henry is a reader of Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” and Jones takes pains to remind us of Satan’s defiant, hopeless declaration that it’s better to reign in hell than serve in heaven. (After death, Henry winds up in a dismally un-Miltonic afterlife, alone in a small rented house where his head scrapes the ceiling.) Such hints don’t clarify this fascinating enigma of a character. Still, Jones’s gift for storytelling provides almost satisfaction enough.
