Colson Whitehead on His Harlem Trilogy

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2:40This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Colson Whitehead's character, Ray Carney, is one of the great crooks in recent fiction. Ray isn't big time, he's not even a kingpin, and he's not even a particularly bad guy. He's a furniture salesman in Harlem. He sells Barker loungers in the store, and out the back door, he fences stolen goods. He's looking to pay his bills and get by. But life tends to get complicated, especially in a novel by Colson Whitehead. Ray first appeared in Harlem Shuffle and returned in the sequel Crook Manifesto. The third book of Colson Whitehead's Harlem Trilogy comes out this summer, and it's called Cool Machine.

3:22Whitehead is one of only four novelists ever to win the Pulitzer Prize twice. We spoke in 2023 when Crook Manifesto had just come out. How did you envision it in the beginning? You started with some journalism. and awfully good journalism, too. Was it difficult to make that leap into imaginative literature, into writing fiction? I always wanted to write fiction. So I loved the Village Voice growing up, and it was my dream job to start off there. I worked in the book section. It was my job to open the 40 books a day we got from booksellers, from publishers. You know, at that point, if you were in the building, you could get work.

4:06And so I hit up the TV editor for my first piece, my big break. And now TV criticism is very accepted and it's a real part of the arts section. But back then it was like the saddest, like, why are you writing about TV? It was really embarrassing. So I figured I would fit in. And my break into journalism was a think piece about the series finales of the show's growing pains and who's the boss. And, you know, 30 years later, I think it holds up. Does it? the definitive think piece about those two. You've used genre all throughout your writing career, all kinds of them, zombies and heists and fantasy in a way.

4:51And you've been questioned sometimes in reviews about why you skip around from one thing to the next. And it's left to Chester Himes maybe to explain this. I just found this quotation began a piece about Chester Himes and the New Yorker by Hilton Alls. since Chester Himes in 1970 writes, I think the only function of the black writer in America now is just to produce works of literature about whatever he wants to write about. At least the world will be more informed about the black American subconscious. Now, that's not to say that you're only writing about race, God knows, but it's kind of a liberating notion that whatever your subject is, whatever the hell you want it to be, and not to just dig one trench your entire career.

5:32Well, yeah, I'm not thinking about what a black writer should be doing. I'm not thinking about what a literary writer should be doing. I was inspired, you know, to become a writer when I was very young by comic books and Stephen King, and I wanted to write fantasy. So that's part of my makeup. And if I keep doing this, I get to write in all these different modes that I enjoy. And in the end, we're sort of not here for a long time on Earth. And I should probably not worry about some abstract critic and what they think I should be doing. I should be doing the work that's compelling and interesting.

6:02And if I like all these different modes, why not write my heist? novel? Why not write my zombie novel? Do you feel some kind of pressure from outside, from wherever, from academia, from critics, from other writers, to do this or that, to be more X or Y? I feel pressure for myself not to screw up the idea. You know, I think in terms of those external pressures you're describing, they're really secondary and small to my own inner voice that's saying, don't slack. You know, keep working hard. Don't coast. Is this sentence the best it can be? Is this paragraph the best it can be? When will this book be finished?

6:48When I've made sure that it's the best book I can write at 52, at 27, at 35. And so my internal pressures are so much more intense than anything outside. What's been your biggest disappointment along the way? um well i think zone one my zombie novel has like a lot has you know people who like it a lot um i thought that horror fans would embrace it more but it is actually pretty slow and cerebral and not necessarily doesn't have all the pleasures one one associates with the horror novel there's definitely some gore and exploding people and stuff and people getting bitten by zombies but it's about trauma you know we're recording this across the street from the former side of the World Trade Center.

7:33And that definitely is in the book. How do you come back from a catastrophe, a personal catastrophe, a societal catastrophe? How do we remake ourselves after a disaster? And so I thought maybe some of the hardcore gore hounds might appreciate some of those musings. And they didn't. Not so much, not so much. I had to go back to The Intuitionist for many, many years. Your first novel. My first novel. And I went back and read it, and I was like, I shouldn't be so hard on myself. The book's not that bad. But you recognized it as you. You could hear yourself. Yeah, yeah. Your habits of mind, your language.

8:10But the preoccupations and the conditions of its creation were so remote. I was such a loner and so broke. And I would walk across the Brooklyn Bridge to save money on the subway, and I would shake my fist at the skyline like, you can't break me, I'm writing this book. And, you know, things are so different now. I have a family, and, you know, I'm not such a loner. But the closest, you know, the most recent book is the one that's closest to me, and I recognize where it comes from. And in this case, I'm excited to finish this, you know, continue that story. Colson, I'd like you to read, if you don't mind, just the opening of Crook Manifesto.

8:52You're describing Carney and his furniture business, which is not quite profitable enough, it turns out, to keep him out of crime altogether. Would you read that for us?

9:29rummy trying not to weave across the sidewalk on the way home from the bars. Four years of honest and rewarding work in home furnishings. Carney outfitted newlyweds for their expedition and upgraded living rooms to suit improved circumstances, coached retirees through the array of modern recliner options. It was a grave responsibility. Just last week, one of his customers told him that her father had passed away in his sleep with a smile on his face while cradled in a sterling dreamer purchased at Carney's furniture. The man had been a plumber with the city for 35 years, she said. His final earthly feeling had been the luxurious caress of that polyurethane core.

10:14Carney was glad the man went out satisfied. How tragic for your last thought to be, I should have gone with the naugahyde. Yeah.

10:25Talk to me about research. I have to think that in order to do these novels, and really other novels of yours, but let's concentrate on these Harlem novels. What's the depth of research? How does it work? For me, it's always primary sources. And so memoirs of gangsters. Bumpy Johnson, who was a Harlem gangster in the 50s, his wife wrote a memoir, you know, trying to set the record straight. I'm not sure what was wrong in the public record. Well, what do you get from Bumpy Johnson's widow's memoir? What are the kind of specific details you might get? Well, she broke down how a numbers operation works.

11:03A numbers operation is an unofficial lottery in different neighborhoods. And she broke out how the numbers runner works and the bank and how they transfer the money. And where else do you go but to the source? And so a lot of it is slang. You know, I love getting authentic nouns and verbs, whether it was from slave narratives for Underground Railroad or for this. William Burroughs' first book, Junkie, is about, you know, being a hustler in Harlem, Upper West Side in downtown in the 50s. And there's this great underworld slang. And for me, someone who loves that, you know, different kinds of slang, whether contemporary or old, it's this real goldmine.

11:42So I'm assembling a vocabulary and a sense of atmosphere. You also have a tremendous knowledge of furniture. And not since, I think, maybe since reading about the glove factory in American Pastoral by Philip Roth, have I seen such attention to a kind of seemingly banal thing as furniture. And our main character, of course, runs a furniture store. And we learn all about not just Barker loungers. That's nothing. I mean, real detail about furniture. I like to get into character. You know, I started doing research into fences. The main character, Ray Carney, is a fence. He takes stolen goods and recirculates them into polite society.

12:26A lot of them will have a front business, and in the back is where they do their illegal shenanigans. So I picked furniture, and then I had to sell it. And that means, you know, finding furniture pamphlets from the 50s and 60s. All that stuff's on Pinterest, you know, weird furniture fanatics. You're going on Pinterest. I pictured you at the Schoenberg Library or something deep in the archives. You can get all this online. I never leave the house. I never leave the house. Too many people outside. Yes, whatever your interest is, someone has put it on Pinterest. And so I can put in the 50s furniture catalog and find somebody scanned in like a Sears catalog.

13:04And it's just great language that I steal, the same way I steal language from a memoir. Give me an example of language that you pluck off of Pinterest. Champagne finishes on the arms of couches and chairs. I think, you know, looking back, my first furniture from watching the Brady Bunch or the Twilight Zone 60s, 70s sitcoms is this very sleek mid-century furniture. So in some ways, those are, I'm describing my platonic ideals of what furniture is. So, you know, a book is a journey, and I was doing some personal journeying into how I feel about furniture. I'm speaking with Colson Whitehead. More in a moment.

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17:04Now, your parents spent some years in Harlem. Yes. Before they moved elsewhere in Manhattan. Were they a help in terms of research, in terms of this kind of, you know, make sure you're not screwing up in terms of status detail? My mom would have been great if I'd actually gone to her for help. It did occur to me that I was describing in the first book, Harlem in the 60s, and Carney is starting a family, and that's when my parents were starting a family in Harlem. So I'd do all this research and all this grunt work, and then I would tell my mother, oh, did you know there was this old chock full of nuts in this place at Hotel Teresa?

17:38And she's like, yeah, I worked around the corner. I was there every day. Blumstein's was a famous department store in Harlem. Found that out, put it in the book, told my mom. She's like, oh, yeah, your dad worked there for two summers during college. Like, what? So, as usual, I have to do it the hard way. I have to do it the hard way when the easy way is right there. It seems almost uncanny, but not only about these books, but others, that they are written at moments in time that are extremely evocative. For example, you just finished writing when the protests came out after the killing of George Floyd.

18:16Did that have any effect on the work? Well, no, I mean, the end of Harlem Shuffle ends with an anti-police riot in Harlem, which actually happened. In 64. In 64. And I conceived of that time period years before George Floyd was murdered. I finished the book the day before the first day of the riots and the protests. So it was really strange. And at that point, it was in the can, and I changed maybe one line that occurred to me. But I was not inspired by that. Turns out if you write about police violence, And, you know, atrocities, if you wait a month, it'll happen again. So that's America. How do you mean it's America?

18:57I mean that when I was writing Underground Railroad and describing slave catchers, the way that people who were writing slave narratives would describe slave catchers were the same way that I would use to be stopped by police. There's the same kind of language of humiliation, outrage, or the sort of abstract horror of being stopped in that way. And I grew up in New York in the 80s, where you hear about Michael Griffith, Elmer Bumpers. Every year, there was some high-profile police brutality case. And there's a big conversation, and then it fades away. And then something else happens, and we talk about it, and then it fades away.

19:38Is that where we are now, vis-a-vis George Floyd in the summer of 2020? We're in between atrocities, and I think we usually are. Perhaps something's being recorded on somebody's pocket cell phone right now, and we'll hear about it next week. But we don't actually put the effort in to change policing. A lot of the country is pretty racist, and we're going to have these eruptions, big or small, until we change that, but nobody seems really that interested. Particularly now or just eternally? I think eternally, yeah. Colson, what sense of political responsibility do you feel as a writer of fiction?

20:18None. Well, in terms of fiction writers in general, do what you want to do. If you want to write about gardening, do that. If you want to write love poetry, do that. For me personally, I like writing about politics and institutional structures and also the city and also pop culture and all these different things are in different books or non-different books. I don't feel responsibility, except not to make the book bad. You feel pushed on the sense of responsibility. You did a very sly and funny thing, I think, in a lecture. You started reciting the first lines of the timeless movie, The Jerk, by Steve Martin, in which he describes himself as...

20:58It was never easy for me. I was born a poor black child singing and dancing on my porch in Mississippi. be. And I think, you know, sometimes when I walk in front of an audience, there are different expectations of what a black person is, a black writer is, you know, if it's a mostly white space. Which is what? Oh, well, I think definitely with, if you came to my work from Underground Railroad, here's this guy who talks about institutional racism and American history. Only, only. Only, yes. And then I come out and I'm just like a weird random guy who's really, really lucky. The people likes his books and is glad to be out of the house and makes weird jokes and talks about these different things.

21:43One of the things that I sense in these novels is a certain sympathy with the criminal and the criminal activity. In other words, it's not presented as just pure horror show and cruelty and all the rest. It's presented as something that's done out of a certain sense of necessity, desperation, and that it's very difficult to do. This is kind of clinical view of the criminal act. How did you come to that? I think I'm getting this right. Maybe I'm not. Well, I think there are different kinds of criminal activity. There's robbery. There's being a fence. And then there's political corruption, all kinds of graft.

22:30And I'm exploring different ways of being a criminal and trying to think about who actually is bad. I think Ray Carney has this secret self, this criminal self. But I think all of us have these different uncivilized impulses in us that we have to tame in order to function in society. And so I think when people connect with Carney, part of that connection is recognizing their own sort of secret life in him. So I think back to your question, I'm not judging. I'm definitely not judging them. It never occurred to me that Carney would be like a bad person. He's a guy just trying to get over, get over, have a nice apartment with enough bedrooms for his kids and be a good husband and sell some furniture.

23:15You know, when we think about the main character, Carney or Pepper, the secondary main character, it's kind of OK because everyone else is worse. Like all their adversaries and all the people they're forced to deal with are so much worse and doing so much – engaging so much deeper corruption and thorough corruption that a murder here and there is not bad compared to the kind of moral bankruptcy. New York City is a huge part of your books, many of them, including The Colossus of New York, which is a portrait of the sea. I love that book. And you say at one point there that talking about New York is a way of talking about the world.

23:57New Yorkers think of themselves as somehow outside the world, a 51st state, maybe a separate country, exceptional. Is New York the same as talking about the world? Well, there's public persona me and then there's a private Coulson. I think that, you know, I think New York is special and it's one of my sort of big subjects. I come to it. I keep coming back to it. And I think, you know, and I think the snob in me wants to say that New York is special. But it is just another place when you get down to it. And if you walk in the subway in Paris or in London, it could be New York subway. And if you get lost in the tall buildings in Sao Paulo, downtown Los Angeles, it could be New York.

24:42And I think what I was trying to do in Colossus of New York, where that quote is from, is evoke how we feel about our home, no matter how big or how small it is. You know, we're always walking around superimposing what used to be there over what's there now. And bemoaning what's being lost. And mourning that. And being a bit unfair to how the city changes. You have been compared to the most disparate writers I can imagine, of anybody I can think of. It ranges from Stephen King to Thomas Pynchon. And I think you take both as a compliment. Yeah, I do. Well, I think, like, maybe you're not a writer, but you're a reader, but you can enjoy Mad Magazine, and you can enjoy Dostoevsky, and you can enjoy...

25:30Yeah, but usually Dostoevsky is not writing Mad Magazine, and Alberg is not writing Crime and Punishment. I guess not, but it seems sort of natural to me that if you like something, why not do it? Who's got the versatility like that that you admire? Who's a model for that? Well, I think an early model for me would have been Stanley Kubrick. You know, his war movie, his black comedy, his horror movie, his sci-fi movie. What can I get out of this genre? You know, I'm throwing everything out that I did last time and starting new. And then David Bowie, you know, in his 70s and early 80s run, he always had a different persona.