{"id":683,"date":"2026-06-26T12:07:21","date_gmt":"2026-06-26T12:07:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=683"},"modified":"2026-06-26T12:07:21","modified_gmt":"2026-06-26T12:07:21","slug":"colson-whiteheads-big-score","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=683","title":{"rendered":"Colson Whitehead\u2019s Big Score"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I was standing at the corner of Ninety-third and Broadway, scanning an empty storefront for signs of literary activity, when Colson Whitehead texted: \u201cBehind you.\u201d It was a clear May afternoon. Whitehead had invited me to his office but specified only the intersection; spinning around, I spotted a dreadlocked figure in shades and a su\u00e8de jacket, slouched on a bench in the median. Once I\u2019d crossed, he rose to greet me, revealing, on the seat, a plaque that read \u201cColson Whitehead\u2019s Office.\u201d He cracked a smile. \u201cGot it for my birthday last November,\u201d he said. \u201cNo urine or dead animals yet.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more Clapback to the Future<\/a><\/p>\n

Whitehead, fifty-six, has a reddish-brown complexion, hooded, inquisitive eyes, and a lightly salted mustache-goatee, which, along with his locs, brings to mind mail-order portraits of Black Jesus. He\u2019s long-limbed but unobtrusive in his movements, like a suave giraffe on the lam, an impression reinforced by his tapering brown Chelsea boots. \u201cIt\u2019s a weird culture, people who sit on benches,\u201d he said, laughing with a snort for punctuation. A thief in his latest novel uses them for reconnaissance, watching Broadway traffic \u201cuntil every vector of every possible getaway was a filament in my web.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Soon, we were riding the elevator to his apartment, in a prewar building near Riverside Park. Whitehead has enjoyed one of the smoothest ascents in contemporary American literature, from his celebrated 1999 d\u00e9but, \u201cThe Intuitionist,\u201d a mystery novel about elevator inspectors, to his back-to-back Pulitzers for \u201cThe Underground Railroad\u201d (2016) and \u201cThe Nickel Boys\u201d (2019). His ten other, wildly disparate books include two satires of media and marketing and an elegiac zombie novel set in Manhattan.<\/p>\n

Like New Yorkers fighting over favorite neighborhoods, devoted readers often reproach one another for their ignorance of the real<\/em> Colson Whitehead. To some, he\u2019s \u201cAmerica\u2019s Storyteller,\u201d as a 2019 Time<\/em> cover declared, reckoning with slavery and segregation in novels destined to become fixtures of high-school syllabi. To others, he\u2019s a jaded Gen X ironist, who once began a memoir with the words \u201cI have a good poker face because I\u2019m half-dead inside.\u201d And, to still others, he\u2019s the spiritual cartographer of the city that never sleeps, given to such aper\u00e7us as that old apartments are \u201ccaretakers of your reinventions.\u201d Whitehead himself identifies, improbably, as a slacker. \u201cI\u2019m a really lazy bitch, but I have a punitive superego,\u201d he told me. \u201cThe two go together.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The elevator doors opened, and we stepped through a vestibule into his apartment. On the walls were art works by Kerry James Marshall, Rashid Johnson, and Ellen Gallagher, and books shelved in colorful modular storage units. In the living room, a tabby cat with a clipped ear lounged on a velvet couch, her front paws propping open an illustrated catalogue of military aircraft. \u201cThat\u2019s Jupiter,\u201d Whitehead said. \u201cShe gets ten per cent nicer every year.\u201d His wife, the literary agent Julie Barer, who\u2019d dedicated his bench, was out, as was their twelve-year-old son, Beckett, who\u2019s been coaching his father through the video game Baldur\u2019s Gate 3. (Whitehead\u2019s other child, Fig, was off finishing a senior thesis at Vassar.) Video games are Whitehead\u2019s usual palate cleanser between projects, but lately he\u2019s been cutting back. \u201cI was going to take a year off from writing, but then, come December, I was really bored,\u201d he said. \u201cLife is short. How many books do I have left?\u201d<\/p>\n

His desk was tucked in a corner at the far end of the room, under windows overlooking neighbors\u2019 rooftops. \u201cShould I report that house?\u201d he said, stroking his beard mock officiously as he pointed out a lavish deck. \u201cSome illegal fun you\u2019re<\/em> having.\u201d The workspace was decorated with framed covers of the Times<\/em> Book Review<\/em>, a vintage sign for knife-sharpening services, a taped-to-the-wall headline from Slate<\/em> (\u201cColson Whitehead Is Still Just Doing His Weird Thing\u201d), and a poster for \u201cRififi,\u201d a film noir about a jewel heist.<\/p>\n

For the past seven years, Whitehead has been writing a trilogy of New York crime novels. Their protagonist, Ray Carney, is a furniture salesman with a sitcom-worthy family and a sideline as a fence. He\u2019s \u201conly slightly bent when it came to being crooked,\u201d but, in 1959, his cousin draws him into a spectacular robbery. It was meant to be a one-off\u2014as was \u201cHarlem Shuffle\u201d (2021), the novel in which it takes place. Yet both Carney and his creator kept getting sucked back in. \u201cCrook Manifesto\u201d (2023) finds Carney tangling with arsonists amid New York\u2019s seventies decline. \u201cCool Machine,\u201d out next month, closes out the series in the eighties, as punks, yuppies, graffiti artists, and mafiosi face off in a city \u201cmalformed across the centuries\u2014a monstrous entity powered by innate miseries, operated by brute will, and held together by pluck, fury, and rebar.\u201d You can almost see the skyline blush.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s a lot of other crime novels where the main character is a real wife guy,\u201d Whitehead observed. He talks about his work as though he were a humble novelty peddler\u2014quite possibly a symptom of impostor syndrome, and a generational horror of coming off like a poseur. But his disavowed intensity finds expression in the monkish professionalism of his characters, whose jobs are at once means of self-avoidance and keys to hidden patterns in the world. More than twenty years ago, he described New York as a city that \u201cmultiplies when you\u2019re not looking,\u201d and, in the trilogy, he pursues this idea on a grand scale. The novels are a time-lapse panorama of a metropolis perpetually reshaped by its inhabitants. Whitehead is one of them, and the trilogy is an archeology of his own foundations.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Whitehead was born in 1969, the year that construction began on the World Trade Center\u2019s South Tower. His mother, Mary Ann, came from a prosperous family of New Jersey undertakers, and taught in New York City\u2019s public schools. (One ancestor, William M. Colson, was a merchant who died in Liberia after a feverish bout of correspondence; in the words of an associate, \u201cHis love for writing proved fatal.\u201d) Her husband, Arch Whitehead, came from a less privileged background. Born in Harlem, he put himself through Dartmouth by singing in night clubs, and eventually founded a headhunting firm. Gregarious but stormy, he had frustrated literary aspirations, writing poetry and a screenplay entitled \u201cA Werewolf in Harlem.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chipp, as Whitehead is known in the family\u2014his full name is Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead\u2014was the third of four children. He arrived after two sisters, Ann and Lynn, and just ten months before a younger brother, Clarke. The family moved constantly, including, once, into the apartment of an upstairs neighbor who\u2019d jumped to his death. \u201cThey were still hosing the guy off the sidewalk, and my dad was, like, \u2018So, is 11-A available?\u2019\u00a0\u201d Whitehead said. He spent most of his childhood on the Upper West Side and every summer in Sag Harbor, where his mother\u2019s family had a beach house.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wouldn\u2019t say nerdy<\/em>, but he had his hobbies,\u201d Ann said of the young Whitehead, whom she recalls reading comic books and duelling their brother with a toy lightsabre. He and Clarke \u201cwere basically the same person until puberty,\u201d Whitehead said, when Clarke emerged as the more \u201cdistracted and rascally\u201d of the pair. Lynn told me that Colson shared his father\u2019s moodiness, if not his stifling conservatism. \u201cHe kind of stopped in the fifties,\u201d she said. \u201cNot once did I see him in a pair of bluejeans.\u201d He was also prone to fits of rage, especially when he\u2019d been drinking, but he expected stoicism from his children. \u201cTalking about feelings just wasn\u2019t done,\u201d Lynn said. \u201cAnd we all have a bit of that in us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Television was the household\u2019s unifying passion. \u201cEvery Saturday on HBO, we\u2019d watch, say, a Sugar Ray Leonard fight or an inappropriate movie like \u2018A Clockwork Orange,\u2019\u00a0\u201d Whitehead recalled. \u201cThen, at eleven, George Carlin or Richard Pryor.\u201d Horror was the genre of choice, from George A. Romero\u2019s zombie films to John Carpenter\u2019s \u201cHalloween.\u201d Whitehead fought Clarke for the paperback novelizations of their favorites, and began his study of narrative in the pages of Fangoria<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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His ambition was to write for Marvel, or to become \u201cthe Black Stephen King.\u201d At Trinity, his illustrious prep school on Broadway, such interests could be isolating, though he eventually fell in with a group of friendly stoners. (In a yearbook photo, he appears in a Joy Division T-shirt under a quote from Joseph Conrad: \u201cWe live as we dream, alone.\u201d) Lynn showed him a more expansive New York, turning him on to post-punk and no-wave bands\u2014ESG, Gang of Four, Liquid Liquid\u2014and the Village Voice<\/em>. \u201cI became this teen-age culture maven,\u201d he told me, regularly going out to see New Wave films or to dance at the legendary downtown club CBGB. In a senior-year English class, he read Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez\u2019s \u201cOne Hundred Years of Solitude\u201d and realized that literary fiction could be as wild as \u201cCarrie\u201d or the X-Men.<\/p>\n

In 1987, he went off to Harvard, where he enraged his father by studying English. \u201c\u00a0\u2018You gotta take economics,\u2019\u00a0\u201d he recalled being told. \u201cI was, like, \u2018No, Daddy, I want to sing!<\/em>\u2019\u00a0\u201d His parents saw him as a future lawyer; instead, he took up smoking and skipped class. Coursework introduced him to Thomas Pynchon, Nathanael West, Samuel Beckett, and Ralph Ellison, all lasting influences. He also improvised his own curriculum of postmodern theory and pop-culture criticism. Whitehead wanted to write, but workshops rejected him and the cliquish undergraduate literary scene put him off. \u201cI\u2019m not really a joiner,\u201d he said. \u201cThe idea of auditioning? Screw you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Coaxing out his talents fell to a more politic peer. Kevin Young\u2014now The New Yorker\u2019s<\/em> poetry editor\u2014was a year behind Whitehead, but already a campus prodigy. He\u2019d taken it upon himself to revive a Black student literary magazine, Diaspora,<\/em> and a co-editor introduced him to Whitehead. \u201cHe was wearing a white T-shirt, jeans, and Chuck Taylors, and I<\/em> was wearing a white T-shirt, khakis, and Chuck Taylors,\u201d Young said of their meeting. \u201cI felt instantly that we were kin.\u201d He published Whitehead\u2019s first short stories, and spent a break living with him in Manhattan, where they saw Afrika Bambaataa d.j.\u2019ing at the Nuyorican Poets Caf\u00e9. Young was fascinated by his ability to find an open diner under any circumstances: \u201cIt was like watching a human computer.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another classmate was the future director Darren Aronofsky, who cast Whitehead as a zombielike \u201cvideo junkie\u201d in his senior-thesis film. Whitehead didn\u2019t write a thesis, though a friend who worked for a TV director landed him a gig writing a feature film. \u201cIt was a teen sex comedy that was a mix between \u2018Risky Business\u2019 and \u2018House Party,\u2019\u00a0\u201d he recalled. \u201cThe person who hired me, her notes were, like, \u2018Can we have a scene where he has to rap his way out of trouble?\u2019\u00a0\u201d After graduation, he spent six months watching television in Sag Harbor, where he, his parents, Lynn, and Clarke\u2014who \u201cdrank and drugged his way to getting kicked out of Dartmouth\u201d\u2014were crowded into the same small house. \u201cBasically, it was insane,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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All that television proved useful at the Voice<\/em>, where he secured a job as an editorial assistant and then, in short order, as a TV columnist. \u201cTV criticism was really frowned upon,\u201d he said. \u201cOnly jerk-offs did it.\u201d Still, he threw himself into the role, skewering the \u201cinvented New York realness\u201d of gritty police procedurals and the ersatz Harlem of a Bill Cosby-backed series filmed on a Disney studio lot \u201cat the corner of Dopey Drive and Minnie Avenue.\u201d Whitehead also wrote for the Voice Literary Supplement<\/em>, ridiculing David Foster Wallace\u2019s foray into rap studies, musing about the affinity between cigarettes and spite, and, for a lark, giving a rave review to \u201cKnitting with Dog Hair,\u201d a novelty craft book that he praised as the antidote to \u201cour hyper-cyber times.\u201d His boyishly knowing voice could tip into outright fiction, as with the Prufrockian spin he gave an invented LL Cool J memoir: \u201cI grow old. I grow old. Shall I wear the bottoms of my baggy jeans rolled?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe nerve of this kid,\u201d Jeff Salamon, his editor at the Voice<\/em>, fondly recalled thinking. \u201cSometimes he\u2019d say, \u2018I\u2019m writing about this show,\u2019 and what would come in was basically a fictional character\u2019s experience<\/em> of the show.\u201d Whitehead was a regular in the smoking lounge of the newspaper\u2019s Cooper Square office, often arriving in a porkpie hat or an \u201cE.T.\u201d-themed beanie. \u201cEverybody was just fucking cool, really on top of it,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was before pop-culture criticism broke into the mainstream, and these incredible knights\u201d\u2014Robert Christgau, J.\u00a0Hoberman, Greg Tate\u2014\u201cwere writing about comics and Foucault and Toni Morrison and Run-DMC.\u201d Whitehead started dating a colleague, Natasha Stovall, who wrote about punk music, and they moved in together in Fort Greene.<\/p>\n

There were crackheads in the neighborhood, and, once, his landlady\u2019s dog was injured by gunfire. But rent was cheap, and Whitehead had ample time to write fiction between columns. His literary aspirations had solidified on a solo trip through Brazil in the summer of 1994. \u201cI had copies of the Odyssey and Joyce\u2019s \u2018Ulysses\u2019 and read them back-to-back, sitting on the beach in my Converse and my cutoff jeans,\u201d he said. \u201cI was, like, \u2018O.K., I\u2019m twenty-five. Maybe I should start.\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n

His first attempt was a satire about a former child actor inspired by Gary Coleman, the star of \u201cDiff\u2019rent Strokes,\u201d imagined as the target of a sinister media company. It was largely an exploration of stereotypes and Black masculinity, Whitehead recalled, and \u201cmore theory than story.\u201d An agent was interested, but dropped him when she couldn\u2019t find a publisher. \u201cA lot of people thought I was on a fool\u2019s errand,\u201d he said of his ambitions. \u201cBut there\u2019s nothing else that was going to make me whole.\u201d<\/p>\n

Vocational commitment was the subject of his d\u00e9but novel, conceived after he spotted a study guide to the elevator-inspector exam at the library. The topic was irresistible: surely no one else had built a mystery around elevator inspection. It also gave him a way to link the rhetoric of Black uplift to the rise of skyscrapers and to millenarian dreams of ascension. His protagonist was Lila Mae Watson, the first Black woman elevator inspector in an unnamed metropolis, who is framed for a catastrophic fall. She belongs to the Intuitionists, a controversial faction of inspectors who communicate with elevators \u201con a nonmaterial basis.\u201d They await a wondrous \u201cblack box\u201d that will bring about the \u201csecond elevation,\u201d while their rivals, the Empiricists, scheme to bring them back to earth.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Whitehead drew on Thomas Pynchon, with his infrastructural conspiracies; Ishmael Reed, whose \u201cMumbo Jumbo\u201d also turns on a racialized metaphysical schism; and Ralph Ellison, with his vision of a marginalized figure illuminating the modern metropolis. \u201cI think my words to him were \u2018You\u2019ve written \u201cInvisible Man,\u201d\u00a0\u2019\u00a0\u201d Young, who was the first to read it, recalled. He was impressed by the novel\u2019s noirish atmosphere, its deadpan approach to the fantastical conceit, and its wit, which stopped short of cynicism. \u201cAll his books have a layer of irony, but that\u2019s to get you there at the table,\u201d Young explained. \u201cHe\u2019s always feeding you more.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whitehead recalled his father\u2019s gruff skepticism: \u201cHow many elevator inspectors are there in the world? Who\u2019s gonna buy it?\u201d Yet the novel found a publisher quickly. A friend encouraged him to send it to Nicole Aragi, a young agent who also represented Junot D\u00edaz, and she placed it at Doubleday. (He\u2019s remained with both agent and publisher ever since.) In 1997, Stovall had persuaded Whitehead to move to San Francisco, where he found a dot-com-boom job writing copy for CNET<\/em>. But California didn\u2019t agree with him, and they moved back to Fort Greene just before the novel appeared. It was so successful that Whitehead had to improvise an extended book tour. Back in San Francisco, he said, \u201cthe only friend I had left was a dominatrix, so I slept in her dungeon.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Intuitionist\u201d arrived amid a new critical appetite for so-called literary genre fiction. That same year, Doubleday published Jonathan Lethem\u2019s \u201cMotherless Brooklyn,\u201d another mystery novel whose deeper subject was the soul of urban life. \u201cWhat binds us together is that we both remember specific, sacred, weird details about New York in the seventies and eighties,\u201d Lethem said of Whitehead. \u201cSometimes I feel like our books are messages to each other.\u201d The two were often paired at readings and became fast friends, frequently seeing each other at a poker night of Brooklyn writers that also included Nathan Englander and Heidi Julavits. Whitehead\u2019s cool, exacting voice reminded Lethem of Rod Serling hosting \u201cThe Twilight Zone\u201d: \u201cThe real Colson is there but standing to one side.\u201d<\/p>\n

His second novel was as encyclopedic and freewheeling as his first had been enigmatic. \u201cJohn Henry Days\u201d (2001) was inspired by the myth of the Black railroad worker who\u2019d died after beating a steam drill in a race. The folk hero makes a few elliptical appearances, along with the bluesmen, scholars, and Tin Pan Alley tunesmiths who shaped his legend. But the main action takes place at a John Henry festival in mid-nineties West Virginia, where J.\u00a0Sutter, a hack journalist who lives in Fort Greene, has been sent by a content-hungry website. Sutter is trying to break his friends\u2019 record for consecutively attended publicity events, the idea being that he, too, is locked in a death match with technology. The novel sprawls, sometimes awkwardly, but its media satire is mordantly hilarious, and it cemented Whitehead\u2019s wunderkind status. In 2002, he received a MacArthur Fellowship, a windfall that prompted him and Stovall, who had married at the turn of the millennium, to start trying for a baby.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Not everyone was taken with his cleverness. Infamously, the novelist Richard Ford spat on Whitehead at a party, as payback for a pan in the Times Book Review<\/em>. (Whitehead had mocked the older writer\u2019s adulterers as less sinful than whiny.) Whitehead himself was panned by James Wood in The New Republic<\/em>, who described \u201cJohn Henry Days\u201d as \u201cfull of noise and irrelevant intensity\u201d and corrupted by \u201cthe mad fluency\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. of email.\u201d Eight years later, Whitehead answered him in Harper\u2019s<\/em>, parodying the critic\u2019s fastidiousness in an essay that declared \u201cHe lifted the cup\u201d a perfect sentence: \u201cAha! cries the famished reader. This is minimalism at its well-marbled finest.\u201d But Wood had also charged Whitehead with avoiding introspection, echoing an assessment that the novelist\u2014who\u2019d developed a self-protective reserve in childhood\u2014was also beginning to reach. Whitehead had been toying with a fabulist reimagining of the Underground Railroad but decided that he wasn\u2019t yet mature enough to do it justice. Before he could write about slavery, he would have to risk something of himself.<\/p>\n

Later in May, I met Whitehead in East Hampton, where he and Barer have a house. It has two white cubical wings connected by a sky bridge, where I could see his silhouetted figure setting the table for lunch. \u201cIt\u2019s not officially<\/em> a gumbo, because there\u2019s okra, tomatoes, and no roux,\u201d Whitehead explained upstairs, tying back his locs to stir a pot of piquant-smelling stew. A passionate cook, he makes most of his family\u2019s meals, specializing in smoked ribs, pork vindaloo, and fried chicken of every nationality, a dish to which he once devoted an essay. Grilling was his father\u2019s m\u00e9tier, and a highlight of their summers in Sag Harbor, though Arch approached it more austerely. \u201cHe literally only made chicken,\u201d Whitehead said, and took offense at requests for barbecue sauce.<\/p>\n

A Pavement song played as he dished out two servings, apologizing for an excess of salt I struggled to detect. He seemed more guarded than before, and I changed the subject from his father to his son. \u201cI thought if we named him after someone depressive and serious, he might become a happy-go-lucky jock or a stockbroker,\u201d Whitehead said. Yet Beckett seems to be taking after his father, immersed, as Whitehead once was, in the worlds of \u201cStar Wars\u201d and D. & D. He\u2019s also a military-history buff, and this summer the family will celebrate his bar mitzvah with a trip to see the D Day beaches in Normandy. \u201cWe\u2019re going to rent a shuttle bus,\u201d Whitehead said, \u201cand I picture it as a sort of \u2018Little Miss Sunshine\u2019-type thing, where everyone has an arc over the course of five days.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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For now, there was another fraught beach to revisit. After lunch, we set out for Sag Harbor in Whitehead\u2019s black BMW X5, which he carefully piloted, hands at ten and two, down empty roads half hidden by scrubby Long Island pines. (He earned his driver\u2019s license during the pandemic, in a Zoom class where all the other students were teens.) There was little to see until we reached Azurest, one of three historically Black enclaves on Sag Harbor\u2019s outskirts. Whitehead took a right at a sign depicting a dozing fisherman, continuing up a shady road toward the bay.<\/p>\n

Sag Harbor, an old whaling port, was once known as the \u201cUnhampton,\u201d for its relative quaintness. In the nineteen-forties, it became one of the first towns in the area where Black families could acquire beachfront property. Whitehead\u2019s maternal grandfather, T. Colson Woody, bought in early, and generations of his family have vacationed there since. Mary Ann came there as a girl, then with her schoolteacher friends on summer breaks, and then with her husband and children, who played with her friends\u2019 children on the beach or in the woods between developments. \u201cChipp and Clarke and their gang of boys would build forts on the beach and shoot off bottle rockets,\u201d Lynn recalled. \u201cWe had free rein.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whitehead wrote his 2009 novel, \u201cSag Harbor,\u201d to memorialize those bygone days, largely erased by the area\u2019s \u201cHamptonization.\u201d Its colorful mid-century houses have increasingly given way to metal-roofed McMansions and, with them, a much whiter population. Seven years ago, a group of Black families had the old developments inscribed on the National Register of Historic Places, hoping to hold back the tide. By contrast, Whitehead was fatalistic. \u201cThat\u2019s just the way of things, the ebb and flow of populations,\u201d he said. \u201cI love this place, and, also, I don\u2019t have to live here.\u201d In East Hampton\u2014which his teen protagonist envisions as a land of \u201cpterodactyls wearing ascots\u201d\u2014there\u2019s more privacy, he said, and fewer of the \u201cghosts and toxic emanations\u201d that he wrote \u201cSag Harbor\u201d to exorcise.<\/p>\n

It was a novel he wasn\u2019t ready to write until he was almost forty. After \u201cJohn Henry Days,\u201d he began another satire, \u201cApex Hides the Hurt,\u201d about a \u201cnomenclature consultant\u201d tasked with renaming a small town out West. Yet he felt unable to continue after the Twin Towers fell on 9\/11, which he watched from Fort Greene Park. Like millions of New Yorkers, he felt that something had been torn not just from the skyline but from his psyche. \u201cI thought they\u2019d always be there standing over me,\u201d he recalled telling his therapist, who brought him to tears by responding, \u201cLike your parents?\u201d<\/p>\n

He pivoted to a book of essays, drawing its title, \u201cThe Colossus of New York\u201d (2003), from one of the sci-fi monsters of his childhood movie nights. They\u2019re playful, intimate sketches, each sentence an errant transmission from the city\u2019s collective consciousness. In the essay \u201cPort Authority,\u201d Whitehead eavesdrops on the dreams of eager new arrivals; in \u201cMorning,\u201d on the unspoken indignities of the daily commute. \u201cYou are a New Yorker when what was there is more real and solid than what is here now,\u201d he writes in the introduction. Later, he adds, \u201cNew York City does not hold our former selves against us. Perhaps we can extend the same courtesy.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The slim volume marked the beginning of a transformation, though several years passed before it ramified. In 2004, Fig was born, and Whitehead took the first of several teaching jobs to provide for his family. He struggled to finish \u201cApex,\u201d which appeared in 2006 to a lukewarm reception. Tired of being a remote puppet master, he began to consider the traditional novel of origins his younger self had eschewed.<\/p>\n

We pulled up to a cherry-red bungalow on an exposed cinder-block foundation, with a deck overlooking the bay\u2019s placid expanse. It was the house of Whitehead\u2019s adolescent summers. He climbed its peeling steps to the deck and stared at the water, his back to the door. \u201cDo you want to go inside?\u201d he asked a minute later, with a resigned, knowing look. I felt like one of the hacks from \u201cJohn Henry Days.\u201d (But of course I said yes.)<\/p>\n

Dated brown couches huddled in musty silence. A slender kitchen island, once his father\u2019s liquor cabinet, stood near a refrigerator laden with sun-bleached photo magnets. No one has lived there since Mary Ann died, three years ago; in 1990, she and Arch left New York and moved in full time\u2014for her, the beginning of a glorious retirement, for him, the acknowledgment of a professional setback. His firm had never recovered from the Wall Street crash of 1987, and his heavy drinking continued.<\/p>\n

\u201cHis anger was a ruling force in my life for so many years,\u201d Whitehead told me, recalling \u201cvolcanic\u201d fights over everything from his writing career to the profanity in Prince\u2019s \u201cSexy M.F.,\u201d which Whitehead dared to play at Christmas. \u201cOne day, he was unloading on me, and I was, like, \u2018I\u2019m thirty-two. I don\u2019t live here anymore.\u2019 I just walked out.\u201d They stopped speaking.<\/p>\n

We walked a few blocks inland to the family\u2019s other house, a stolid white saltbox built by Mary Ann\u2019s father in the nineteen-forties. In the mid-two-thousands, Whitehead periodically rented the house from an aunt, hosting friends on nostalgic trips that spurred him to write about the place. \u201cIt used to be much more secluded,\u201d he said en route, as we stepped aside for contractors\u2019 trucks and vans. Once there, he led us to the back yard, pointing at a trio of windows above a porch mottled with lichens. It was the bedroom where he and Clarke had stayed in as boys. \u201cHe had his blue bike, and I had my yellow one,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019d set off in the mornings and not come back till the lights came on.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more Refik Anadol, The Art World\u2019s Happy Warrior for A.I.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Their childhood\u2019s twilight is at the core of \u201cSag Harbor,\u201d which he wrote at the house in 2008. On the surface, it\u2019s a Gen X coming-of-age comedy, satirizing the postpubescent neuroses of \u201cblack boys with beach houses\u201d in the street-obsessed eighties. Benji, the protagonist, who narrates from adulthood, is fifteen and determined to distinguish himself from the brother who\u2019s always been his double. He roams the developments with a group of boys whose priorities include girls, cars, BB-gun fights, and mastering the \u201cassorted field exercises of black boot camp.\u201d (\u201cEverybody was faking it,\u201d Benji triumphantly concludes after watching two friends fumble a handshake at the beach.) Yet the book is also about the disappearance of time and places, with summer\u2019s end presaging more permanent losses. \u201cAsk, How long are you out for? and a cloud wiped the sun,\u201d Whitehead writes. \u201cThe question trailed a whiff of autumn.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another cloud is adult dysfunction. Benji\u2019s father is a volatile patriarch who grills during blizzards and hits him for failing to manfully respond to a classmate\u2019s racist slight. The father is occasionally charming, even tender, but also an alcoholic, whose afternoon cocktails portend such upheaval that Benji learns to play dead when he hears the click of the kitchen island\u2019s magnetic lock. When the novel was published, in 2009, Whitehead called it semi-autobiographical. Seventeen years later, he didn\u2019t mind admitting that he\u2019d changed little other than the names.<\/p>\n

Arch died less than two months before the book\u2019s publication. He\u2019d spent a bucket-list year writing in Ecuador, then returned to enter hospice, sick with a cancer that he\u2019d hidden from his children. \u201cI didn\u2019t want to be the jerk who didn\u2019t talk to their dying dad,\u201d Whitehead said, but when he visited his father he was angrily rebuffed. \u201cHe said, \u2018It\u2019s too late to apologize,\u2019 and I said, \u2018I\u2019m not here to apologize. I just wanted to say goodbye.\u2019\u00a0\u201d Mary Ann signed off on the novel, and Clarke\u2014who, after a series of odd jobs, had just earned a master\u2019s in teaching\u2014was touched by how much his brother had remembered. \u201cFor me, that book was \u2018I\u2019m gonna let it all hang out, and it\u2019ll be good for me as a writer and as a person,\u2019\u00a0\u201d Whitehead said, adding that he probably couldn\u2019t have written it if he and his father hadn\u2019t been estranged. \u201cIt was part of becoming a grownup.\u201d<\/p>\n

He was relieved to have written a character so like himself without readers \u201crecoiling in terror.\u201d But one person had reacted differently than he\u2019d hoped. For years, he and Stovall had been divided over their future. They split up a few months after \u201cSag Harbor\u201d was published, and though neither was anxious to discuss the circumstances, an aside in Whitehead\u2019s fried-chicken essay hints at the final straw. \u201cI sent Sag Harbor<\/em> to someone who\u2019d read a lot of my previous work, and she was taking her time getting back to me,\u201d he writes. The reticent reader turns out to be his wife, who, when confronted, admits that she prefers the protagonists of his other books. \u201c\u00a0\u2018You know the main character is basically me, right?\u2019\u00a0\u201d he asks her. Then, en route to a reflection on collard greens, he adds, \u201cWe\u2019ve gone our separate ways.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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We ended the afternoon with a walk to Sag Harbor\u2019s downtown, a stretch of restaurants and boutiques which terminates in a long wharf. There was the ice-cream shop where he\u2019d worked as a teen, and the century-old grocery store that inspired a novel by John Steinbeck. Whitehead sat down on a bench in front of the Five and Dime, a general store with a red-and-yellow awning. He draped his arm over the backrest and stretched out his legs, looking relieved to have cleared the day\u2019s gantlet. \u201cThere\u2019s a lump on my back, and I thought, Maybe it\u2019s my last interview. Do I have any famous words to impart?\u201d he\u2019d said on the walk. \u201cBut then I went to the doctor, and he was, like, \u2018It\u2019s just a lump of fat.\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n

Whitehead\u2019s family would be joining him the next day in East Hampton, and he was awaiting an Uber when a man in a hat and shades introduced himself as a photographer. \u201cI\u2019m doing a project on the famous authors of Long Island,\u201d the man said, scribbling down his number. \u201cMaybe we can take some frames?\u201d<\/p>\n

Five hundred people had signed up to see Whitehead speak at the Teton County Library, in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and a few dozen had gathered backstage in its auditorium for a reception.<\/p>\n

\u201cTwo Nobel Prizes!\u201d an elderly woman exclaimed, clasping the author\u2019s hand in hers. She evidently meant his Pulitzers, but he smiled gamely, telling her that he was \u201cworking on the peace one.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cCongratulations on your literary successes!\u201d another woman said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThanks!\u201d he replied. \u201cI have no hobbies.\u201d<\/p>\n

He floated among the tiny tables, nursing a lime LaCroix and picking at finger foods. Some fans wanted to tell him where they\u2019d once lived in New York City. Others expressed surprise that the author of such harrowing novels seemed to radiate inner calm. The vast majority were older white women. (So was the reader who, a week earlier, had seen me on the subway with a copy of \u201cThe Nickel Boys,\u201d and demanded to know why I wasn\u2019t in tears.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Whitehead took the stage at around seven, rocking at the hips like a boxer readying himself to deliver a quick knockout. \u201cHowdy-do,\u201d he began, to immediate laughter, then embarked on a mock recitation of his life story. \u201cI was born a poor Black child,\u201d he said. \u201cI remember the days sittin\u2019 on the porch with my family, singin\u2019 and a-dancin\u2019 down in Mississippi. Or maybe that was someone else. Steve Martin in \u2018The Jerk.\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n

He continued in that spirit for the next forty minutes. Whitehead has long cultivated a faux-na\u00efve persona in book talks and opinion pieces. At one point, he brought up the Gooch, an A.I. assistant he\u2019d invented for an essay in the Times<\/em>\u2014who pings him, he claimed, whenever he loses his butt. He might have made a good comedian, and he briefly considered writing a novel about Richard Pryor, whose portrait he keeps behind his desk. But humor also helps him evade the projections people make about his work. Whitehead has been labelled a \u201cgenre bender,\u201d an embodiment of Obama-era \u201cpost-Blackness,\u201d and an emissary of \u201cliterary Brooklyn.\u201d He has deftly escaped these pigeonholes, in part by insuring that each of his books is radically different from the last. That got harder when he won American literature\u2019s most prestigious awards for back-to-back novels about slavery and segregation.<\/p>\n

Afterward, he was asked about race and politics almost exclusively, a narrowing of his work that often chafed. Onstage, he pre\u00ebmpted such expectations with a joke. \u201c\u00a0\u2018I thought you said they were bringing that slavery guy,\u2019\u00a0\u201d he said, pretending to be a member of the audience. \u201c\u00a0\u2018He\u2019s up there talking about Gary Coleman and Neanderthals!\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n

Whitehead always knew he\u2019d eventually write a \u201cslavery book,\u201d he\u2019d told me earlier. \u201cEveryone does.\u201d But he postponed his for many years. During his divorce, he wrote \u201cZone One\u201d (2011), a novel that is set in the shaky aftermath of a zombie apocalypse and follows a crew of bored, traumatized \u201csweepers\u201d as they purge Manhattan of the remaining undead. Next was \u201cThe Noble Hustle\u201d (2014), a comically abject memoir about competing in the World Series of Poker. In 2013, he was about to embark on a novel about a Brooklyn writer\u2019s midlife crisis when he told Barer, then his fianc\u00e9e, about an idea he\u2019d had for a literalized Underground Railroad.<\/p>\n

Kevin Young had introduced the pair in 2009, at a tenth-anniversary conference for the Portland literary magazine Tin House<\/em>. Two years later, they crossed paths again when a mutual friend\u2019s change of plans left them alone together at drinks. \u201cIt was clear that he was interested,\u201d Barer told me. They bonded over growing up between the Upper West Side and Long Island. Whitehead was also struck by Barer\u2019s seriousness about her work as an agent\u2014commitment to one\u2019s calling being the signature quality of his protagonists. The trait was on display when he mentioned his idea. \u201cI was, like, \u2018Please drop everything and write that book!\u2019\u00a0\u201d she said. By the end of the year, they were married, Beckett was born, and Whitehead was writing \u201cThe Underground Railroad.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The joy of new marriage and renewed fatherhood helped him through the darkest story he\u2019d ever told. Cora, the novel\u2019s heroine, is a slave on a Georgia plantation, where she\u2019s stigmatized because her mother escaped when she was a child. After her master dies, she, too, runs away, and the heretofore realist narrative takes a speculative turn. She travels via subterranean tunnels and train stations to the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Indiana. Each state evokes a different phase of white supremacy and the unending battle against it, folding events as disparate as the Tuskegee syphilis experiment and the Exoduster movement into a panoramic allegory patterned on \u201cGulliver\u2019s Travels.\u201d<\/p>\n

The prose had more fleetness and gravity than anything he\u2019d previously written, while the structure conveyed the ironies of history without the showy encyclopedism that had bogged down \u201cJohn Henry Days.\u201d In one scene, Cora is hired to re\u00ebnact her enslavement at a living museum. \u201cOld Colson would have been, like, \u2018Who\u2019s the curator? What\u2019s the theory?\u2019\u00a0\u201d he said. \u201cBut I no longer had the need to catalogue so thoroughly.\u201d The novel\u2019s success was seismic. Oprah selected it for her book club; at her compound in Montecito, Whitehead was so nervous that her staff insisted on blow-drying the damp patches of his dress shirt before they were introduced. A few months later, he won the National Book Award for Fiction. The ceremony was just eight days after Trump\u2019s election, which, uncharacteristically, moved Whitehead to issue a rallying cry from the lectern: \u201cBe kind to everybody, make art, and fight the power.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whitehead has never avoided politics; he joined Zohran Mamdani\u2019s inaugural committee, and he has weighed in on everything from the way A.I. threatens human creativity to the mistreatment of pro-Palestine activists. Yet he\u2019d always kept political agendas from determining the course of his imagination. Even so, America\u2019s latest white-supremacist turn propelled him toward another dark history: the discovery of a mass grave on the grounds of a shuttered Florida reformatory called the Dozier School for Boys. Surviving former residents alleged that rape and torture had been routine there for decades, especially under segregation, when Black boys bore the worst of the abuse.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Nickel Boys\u201d fictionalizes their unspeakable experiences. As in \u201cSag Harbor,\u201d Whitehead\u2019s subject is a community of adolescent boys, a pair of whom illustrate divergent paths\u2014not, this time, out of paradise but through an inferno. Elwood is a promising, almost unbelievably innocent young man whose pastimes include reading the encyclopedia and listening to Dr. Martin Luther King,\u00a0Jr., on vinyl. He aspires to join the civil-rights movement. Then, after hitching a ride from a stranger in a stolen car, he\u2019s sent to Nickel Academy, where he befriends Turner, a boy of similar age whose misfortunes have left him more worldly-wise. Their entwined struggles pose questions about the utility of righteousness in a system of inhuman cruelty, which come to a head, years later, in a dramatic reversal.<\/p>\n

Both \u201cThe Underground Railroad\u201d and \u201cThe Nickel Boys\u201d inspired screen adaptations, by Barry Jenkins and RaMell Ross, respectively. Jenkins had been pursuing Whitehead since he first read \u201cThe Intuitionist,\u201d in 2010. \u201cI was, like, \u2018A Black woman is basically Luke Skywalker?\u2019\u00a0\u201d he told me. \u201c\u00a0\u2018Sign me up.\u2019\u00a0\u201d Years later, the success of \u201cMoonlight\u201d emboldened him to try for \u201cThe Underground Railroad,\u201d and this time he managed to earn the author\u2019s trust. Jenkins lavished attention on the cinematography of his series, which came out in 2021: \u201cWe created an entire lighting scheme around the way he described the Great Spirit.\u201d Ross\u2019s film, which came out last year, was shot from the boys\u2019 points of view in colorful hues that belie their situation\u2019s brutality. Whitehead, who\u2019d praised Jenkins\u2019s adaptation at the podium in Wyoming, was evasive when asked about Ross\u2019s. \u201cFor me, \u2018The Nickel Boys\u2019 is a story of psychological realism, and the adaptation was a little ethereal,\u201d he said. A woman in my row turned to her companion and hazarded a translation: \u201cHe hates it!\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Obscured by the film\u2019s unusual perspective is the novel\u2019s third-person remove, which gives space to the question of why one boy makes it out alive and the other doesn\u2019t. Midway through writing \u201cThe Nickel Boys,\u201d Whitehead lost his brother, Clarke, who was only forty-eight. Like Arch, Clarke had become an alcoholic, and was unable to shake his addiction even after he found a stable career in teaching. In the years before his death, he was in and out of rehab, relapsing despite his siblings\u2019 efforts to keep him sober.<\/p>\n

\u201cAround Thanksgiving in 2017, his landlord called and said, \u2018Your brother\u2019s dead,\u2019\u00a0\u201d Whitehead had told me. \u201cI was in shock.\u201d<\/p>\n

It fell to Whitehead to enter Clarke\u2019s apartment, above a pizza parlor in Bay Ridge. Since \u201cSag Harbor,\u201d he had been processing their drift apart through his fiction, and he had already begun to give something of their bond to Elwood and Turner. But, once the medical examiners had left and the necessary calls had been made, Whitehead, alone in his brother\u2019s bedroom, could see that Clarke had never really left their tandem youth. \u201cWe did everything together,\u201d he told me, laughing softly as his eyes welled. \u201cAnd he still had all of our childhood totems, like the poster for \u2018Escape from New York.\u2019 He never outgrew them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Light filled the uptown 1 train as it climbed onto the elevated tracks. \u201cThey were green in the seventies,\u201d Whitehead said of the seats, unlike the orange and yellow of today\u2019s car, itself soon to be retired. As children, he and Clarke liked to press their noses to the windows and look down the tunnels: \u201cSoot would powder us.\u201d In the nineties, he remembered late-night trains where everyone\u2014including him\u2014would smoke, until a police officer put an end to the \u201ccocktail party.\u201d Best of all, he said, was finding himself in a car that was completely empty, as though headed for \u201csome weird ghost-map alternative universe.\u201d<\/p>\n

From theoretical elevators to abolitionist undergrounds, Whitehead has always drawn metaphors from the mysterious mechanics of transport. The subway is his urtext, and a key inspiration for his trilogy was the 1974 heist film \u201cThe Taking of Pelham One Two Three.\u201d Four men hijack a subway and demand a million-dollar ransom, setting off a chain of events that touches every stratum of city life. Passengers swear and cry in multiple languages; at Gracie Mansion, an unpopular mayor hesitates to address the public for fear of being booed. \u201cEverybody is just, like, an angry New Yorker,\u201d Whitehead said. \u201cThey\u2019re sweating and bickering in great outer-borough accents, and there\u2019s a schlumpy existentialism, too.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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His trilogy is, likewise, a straphangers\u2019 gallery of metropolitan oddballs, from Zippo, a pyromaniac turned blaxploitation filmmaker, to Uncle Rich, a master criminal who stages a daring raid on the Waldorf-Astoria from a disused train tunnel with the help of a homeless army. Like \u201cPelham,\u201d the novels map New York through the endlessly ramifying consequences of crime, which illuminate its workings like radioactive tracers in a monster\u2019s bloodstream. At its heart is one relentless imperative\u2014to rise.<\/p>\n

From the 1 stop at 137th, we made our way to Strivers\u2019 Row, a stretch of limestone- and terra-cotta-fronted town houses known since the Harlem Renaissance as the most elegant block in the area. Whitehead remembered attending a Jack-and-Jill event in one of the houses: \u201cConsidering how run-down the rest of the neighborhood was in the seventies, it was really stark the way they glowed.\u201d In the trilogy, Ray Carney and his wife, Elizabeth, raise their two children on the block, just steps from her own childhood home. \u201cAfter what I put Cora and the Nickel boys through, having someone who could scheme and win and not be totally defeated by racism and capitalism was intoxicating,\u201d Whitehead explained. Yet Carney\u2019s journey is fraught with Odyssean dangers, which he faces with uxorious determination: \u201cWhat else was an ongoing criminal enterprise complicated by periodic violence for, but to make your wife happy?\u201d<\/p>\n

Carney is not only a clean-cut and charismatic salesman\u2014\u201cIf that sofa you\u2019re resting on is familiar, Mrs. Williams, that\u2019s because it was on \u2018The Donna Reed Show\u2019\u00a0\u201d\u2014but the son of a violent criminal. His spectre haunts Carney, particularly because his father\u2019s ill-gotten gains were his store\u2019s seed capital. His sideline as a fence compounds this unsteady compartmentalization; a bridge between legitimate and illegitimate worlds, he sees his job as facilitating \u201cchurn,\u201d or the \u201cnatural flow of goods in and out and through people\u2019s lives.\u201d At the start, he limits himself to helping Black thieves in Harlem sell stolen electronics to the merchants of Radio Row, in the Financial District. But his wayward cousin Freddie constantly inveigles him into more serious mischief. At the end of \u201cHarlem Shuffle,\u201d Freddie aids the junkie scion of a corrupt Manhattan Dutch real-estate dynasty in pilfering the family safe, forcing Carney to deal with the aftermath.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The caper unfolds amid the Harlem riot of 1964, dramatizing the differential treatment of impoverished looters and the bigwigs who \u201cnotarized their misdeeds or engraved them into bronze plates for building fa\u00e7ades.\u201d Its climax is a thrilling chase through midtown; skilled at wringing texture from tension, Whitehead makes every close shave an excuse to animate the city, at one point inventing an entire Broadway show\u2014critical reception included\u2014in the time it takes Carney to sprint through its exiting audience. But the novel\u2019s spiritual conclusion is the demolition of Radio Row to clear the way for the World Trade Center. \u201cThe buildings of the old city loomed over the broken spot, this wound in itself,\u201d Whitehead writes. \u201cIf you bottled the rage and hope and fury of all the people of Harlem and made it into a bomb, the results would look something like this.\u201d The passage echoes Whitehead\u2019s response to 9\/11, as Carney mourns the neighborhood that the Twin Towers would supplant.<\/p>\n

Earlier, we\u2019d cut across St. Nicholas Park, with its steep stone stairs and outcroppings of exposed bedrock. \u201cAtop the unchanging schist, the people replaced each other, the ethnic tribes from all over trading places in the tenements and townhouses,\u201d Whitehead writes in the second installment, \u201cCrook Manifesto.\u201d It\u2019s the nineteen-seventies. New York is bankrupt and Harlem is aflame, as slumlords torch buildings for insurance money in cahoots with politicians pushing \u201curban renewal.\u201d Paralleling this fiery drama is a slower accretion of changes to the city\u2019s fabric, which convey an almost tectonic sense of time\u2019s passage. For research, Whitehead trawled the front pages of every New York Times<\/em> from the period, read mayors\u2019 memoirs and the autobiography of a mobster\u2019s widow, and watched strangers\u2019 digitized 8-mm. footage on YouTube. \u201cWere they wearing hats?\u201d he said. \u201cHow much was a tongue sandwich? For me, that\u2019s gold.\u201d Realism and fantasy go hand in hand, he told me: \u201cBeing precise allows you to make things up.\u201d<\/p>\n

We passed the Harlem Y.M.C.A. at 135th and Seventh\u2014across the street from its original site, where Langston Hughes once lived. (Whitehead\u2019s next novel, which centers on New Yorkers before, during, and after the First World War, features a character who stays there, though Whitehead declined to say more about the book: \u201cRight now, it\u2019s just mine.\u201d) The trilogy also follows in a long tradition of Harlem fiction, including Chester Himes\u2019s detective novels and the more recent mysteries of Walter Mosley. But they\u2019re even more indebted to Donald E. Westlake, whose Parker novels, under the pseudonym Richard Stark, persuaded Whitehead to write about criminals rather than detectives.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf Elmore Leonard had been alive, he would\u2019ve fucking loved them,\u201d Graham Yost, the showrunner of an FX series based on a Leonard novella, said of Whitehead\u2019s trilogy. He\u2019s working on a \u201cHarlem Shuffle\u201d adaptation for Apple TV, to be produced by Barry Jenkins, and praised Whitehead\u2019s decision to focus on a small-time criminal. (At one point, Carney struggles to hold a gun.) The pilot will dramatize the trilogy\u2019s opening heist at the Hotel Theresa on 125th, a thirteen-story tower with a striking white fa\u00e7ade once known as the Waldorf of Harlem.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cIt was really glamorous seventy years ago,\u201d Whitehead said when we reached the building, now an office complex with a White Castle on the ground floor. A neighborhood history marker detailed its glorious past, under the ominous heading \u201cWhile We Are Still Here.\u201d The eternal question of who belongs in New York comes to the fore in \u201cCool Machine,\u201d as the slicker but no less corrupt city of the eighties rises from the ashes of burned tenements. The book\u2019s relatively gentrified heists involve the art market, the profitable advent of cable television, and various criminals\u2019 suburban retirement plans\u2014underscored by repeated allusions to John Carpenter\u2019s dystopian thriller \u201cEscape from New York.\u201d The movie\u2019s eye-patched protagonist, Snake, lands a glider atop the World Trade Center, tasked with rescuing a kidnapped President from a city that has descended into anarchy.<\/p>\n

Not everyone can \u201cmake it here,\u201d at least not forever. The book\u2019s second novella\u2014each installment of the trilogy comprises three\u2014is told from the perspective of Carney\u2019s accomplice Pepper, a stoical enforcer and friend of his father\u2019s of whom we had been told, \u201cAny smile that broke out on his face was a mutiny swiftly put down.\u201d A brooding sideman in the first two books, Pepper emerges as the most sympathetic character of the third, aging in a city he no longer recognizes. He swigs Pepto-Bismol for relief from what might be stomach cancer. Yuppies have taken over his favorite bar. On the hunt for a stolen African mask, he falls in with a young restitution activist whose arty downtown world seems to him like a foreign country. \u201cWhat the hell was a Liquid Liquid?\u201d he wonders after a punk concert. \u201cSounded like the complaint of an angry janitor.\u201d It\u2019s the New York of Whitehead\u2019s CBGB youth, seen through the eyes of a relic from the days of street preachers and dream books.<\/p>\n

At last, we reached the northeast corner of 125th and Morningside, where a streetwear store occupied the ground floor of a four-story apartment building. \u201cSo here we are,\u201d Whitehead said grandly\u2014Carney\u2019s Furniture, his hero\u2019s hard-won slice of the city. Last year, after a \u201cHarlem Shuffle\u201d walking tour, he happened to pass by the shop with extra copies. \u201cI was, like, \u2018Here, I wrote about this address in my crime book,\u2019\u00a0\u201d he said, doing jazz hands and affecting a needy-author voice. At the register, two \u201ctwentysomething dudes on their phones\u201d gave him blank, pitying stares. \u201cThey were a little wary, like, \u2018Is this a religious pamphlet?\u2019\u00a0\u201d He laughed-snorted at the memory. Then he rounded the corner to the building\u2019s other side, where a door\u2019s outline was faintly visible under thick red paint. It was Carney\u2019s side entrance and portal to the underworld, whose inexorable gravity is described as a \u201csickness drawing everything into itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

At least in their professionalism, Whitehead\u2019s protagonists have always had an element of self-portraiture. But in Ray Carney\u2014a man whose relentless striving brings him only closer to the past\u2014he\u2019s invented an unusually perfect double. What\u2019s a novel but a big score of details burgled from the world? And what\u2019s a novelist but a fence, furnishing imaginary scenes with choice pieces of reality while obscuring their provenance? Over the years, it becomes clear that he does what he does not just for the money, or even for the thrill, but because it makes him part of the churn, a safe for the secrets of a city so quick to change that, as Whitehead writes in \u201cColossus,\u201d \u201cwe can never make proper goodbyes.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Near the end of the trilogy, Carney and Elizabeth dine at Windows on the World, the luxury restaurant that once looked out from the North Tower\u2019s uppermost floors. It\u2019s another reference to \u201cEscape from New York,\u201d which Whitehead watches annually in honor of Clarke: \u201cIf I don\u2019t do it, who will?\u201d\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

Read more Everyone Wants to Touch the Blue Coating in the Reflecting Pool<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Julian Lucas profiles the novelist Colson Whitehead in anticipation of \u201cCool Machine,\u201d the final installment of his Harlem Trilogy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":682,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-683","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-profiles"],"yoast_head":"\nColson Whitehead\u2019s Big Score - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=683\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Colson Whitehead\u2019s Big Score - City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Julian Lucas profiles the novelist Colson Whitehead in anticipation of \u201cCool Machine,\u201d the final installment of his Harlem Trilogy.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=683\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-06-26T12:07:21+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"43 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=683#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=683\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3e7ce0c0c60d21e12a5ac61fb2b786d4\"},\"headline\":\"Colson Whitehead\u2019s Big Score\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-06-26T12:07:21+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=683\"},\"wordCount\":8669,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=683#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/06\\\/677d917a08d2cc7ad5f986202ab2a63f.webp\",\"articleSection\":[\"Profiles\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=683#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=683\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=683\",\"name\":\"Colson Whitehead\u2019s Big Score - 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