Colson Whitehead, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, talks with award-winning writer and journalist, Becky Manawatu (Ngāi Tahu) about monsters, Marvel and “just trying not to screw up”.
There are nightmarish scenes in Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book Nickel Boys.
Few grislier than an escape where the story’s monsters lurk about the fences of freedom pointing their shotguns into the open pasture of tall, swaying wild grass.
Talking to me on Zoom from New York though, monsters don’t appear to be plaguing Whitehead. Today, not even Donald Trump’s arraignment in New York can bother him.
Whitehead laughs with a light snort at headlines suggesting New York is bracing for the ex-President’s arrival. He says there are a few reporters about, but that’s all.
Whitehead is not long home from a holiday with his family to the Galapagos Islands, and he’s looking forward to his trip to be part of Auckland’s Writers Festival.
It will be his first visit to New Zealand, and he’s excited. Our chat reminds him of that, yet his thoughts are never far from his work.
He was lying in the darkness just half an hour before, wondering how to fix a particular scene in his current project.
Ten books in, including two works of non-fiction, two Pulitzer Prizes, and most recently a Humanities Medal at the States National Arts Awards, he still faces doubts: What’s working? Is this a terrible image? Is this a bad sentence?
“And that doesn’t change, whether things are going well or things going poorly.”
By things going well or poorly, he means reception.
He describes his books’ most recent reception, as a “nice run”.
But he’s very willing to step back and acknowledge his journey holistically.
“You know, it’s been 25 years, and some books have been understood and some ignored. I can’t really control that, you know. Whenever I finish the book, I think I’ve done the best I can. I think everyone should love it because it’s such a nice story so I can’t account for why this book becomes popular or accepted, because for me I’m just always doing the same thing which is just trying not to screw it up.”
He recalls being handed a $500 royalties cheque for Zone One, along with a message from his publisher – “no one likes it”, Whitehead laughs.
The zombie novel was his fifth. It followed his auto-fiction Sag Harbour, and preceded his award-winning Underground Railroad.
The Underground Railroad miniseries premiered in 2021, based on Colson Whitehead's 2016 novel. Photo / Supplied
He admits being slightly surprised Zone One didn’t find a larger audience.
He says the novel was his “salute” to the post-apocalyptic literature and movies he loved as a kid. But in a literary sense a zombie novel is an opportunity to critique humanity.
“What drives my conception of the zombie is that a monster is just a person who stopped pretending. So in zombie movies, you know, your neighbour, your loved one. your teacher, who appears to be human, for all this time suddenly stops pretending, and reveals himself to be a monster.”
Whitehead wanted from a young age to be a writer, inspired by Stephen King and his love for Marvel comics. Monsters, horror, heroes.
Between the ages of 10 and 12, he set his sights on growing up to write something like X-Men or The Avengers, maybe a book with werewolves or robots, he says.
With a varied body of work – including speculative, science, autobiographical and historical fiction – it is fair to say his earlier influences have been honoured, while emulating those he found later.
“When I got to college, you know, I started reading people like Joyce and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and thought, maybe there’s a different kind of novel I can write. Something a little more … ”
He pauses as if avoiding the words “serious” or “literary”.
“ … Or doesn’t have any monsters and robots, and werewolves. So, I was inspired by people like Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon.”
The two-time Pulitzer Prize winner swerves and ducks from literary labels throughout our interview.
Out of college, he began working for The Village Voice, an American news and culture paper, touted as an alternative newsweekly.
There he honed his craft, assisting with the books section. He wrote book and music reviews and worked as a TV critic.
“Now that’s cool,” he says. “But back then it was like, ‘Why don’t you get a real job? It’s like I can’t get a real job. That’s why I’m doing this,” he laughs, “and also I was raised by a TV so I’m glad I can monetise my early childhood.”
Journalism helped him drop some bad habits, pick up some better ones, and made him “less precious” about his work.
“Obviously it’s a collaboration and taking in other people’s input is important … And then, you know, if you’re writing two or three times a month, or four times a month, you just get better at it.”
Feedback from talented editors and critical readers helped him.
“You know if you write a bad article, you get letters, and if you write a good article everyone’s like, ‘Hey! Good job.’ And so you get that kind of reaction or response that teaches you how to become a better writer.”
Eventually, he gained the confidence to freelance and got serious about his fiction.
With a half-baked question, I ask him about his commitment to writing historical fiction, given the past three novels he’s written were set in the 1960s (Nickel Boys and Harlem Shuffle) and the early 1800s (The Underground Railroad).
He doesn’t go as far as rejecting the idea that these books are historical fiction, and that he has such a commitment, but simplifies it.
“Yeah, I mean, I don’t see myself as having a mission to write historical fiction. My first novels are very contemporary and sort of diagnosing how we live now.”
His attraction to writing novels set in the past came after he “sort of ran out of things to say that were interesting” about the present.
Writing historical novels became a way to hit the refresh button.
“[It] has been a way to find new material and sort of rejuvenate myself and the term historical novel doesn’t mean much to me …
“It’s just a novel set in the past, and it provides me with a way to talk about people, well, not as close to me. And so, I have to recreate the psychology of an enslaved person in 1850, the psychology of a young boy from the South in the 1960s, the psychology of my parents’ generation, who in the 60s were young people starting a family.”
The Underground Railroad is a miniseries premiered in 2021, based on Colson Whitehead's 2016 novel.
Dozier became the model for Whitehead’s fictional Nickel Academy. It operated from January 1, 1900, to June 30, 2011, and for a time, was the largest reform school in the States. Despite being an abusive institution, with a shocking reputation, it failed a state inspection only in 2009.
Questions about the number of deaths at the school and unmarked graves spurred a survey by the University of South Florida in 2012. The survey found 55 burials on the grounds, most outside the cemetery, and revealed nearly 100 deaths at the school.
‘It was a one-day story, it popped up and disappeared, but it stayed with me.’
For Whitehead, a troubling absence of information prompted him to begin Nickel Boys.
“A lot of the survivors who came forward to tell stories about the horrors of the school were white, so I wondered about the black part of campus.”
Investigators at Dozier found that three times as many black as white students died and were buried at the school.
The novel focuses on the fictional Elwood Curtis, a studious black student with a strong sense of social justice. On the first day of classes at university, he hitchhikes home with a man who, unbeknownst to him, has stolen the car he is driving. Elwood is arrested, convicted and sent to Nickel Academy.
Whitehead said the results of the research did not weigh as heavily on him as creating the psychology of the “tormented, the tormentors”.
“What kind of person does that teenager grow into? Who survives? Who doesn’t? You know it became an extension of the Underground Railroad, trying to put myself in the psychology of an enslaved person …
“It’s not the research that’s hard. It’s the writing and getting into that sort of space to tell the stories truthfully and honestly, that’s more difficult.”
Honesty is one of the responsibilities he takes seriously, along with the not-screwing-it-up.
Having written about history and race in America, he’s often asked about his responsibility as an artist to address societal ills.
“For me, my responsibility is just to have an idea I find interesting ...
“I’m not here to please some imaginary critic or imaginary audience. I’m here to make the most interesting art for myself, and if I do it right, you know people come along for the ride. And sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t, but I’m not so much hung up on what other people are expecting, what they expect black artists to do, what they expect artists period to do. I have enough time with my own expectations of my work to think about other people.”
If personally compelled to, however, he will address societal ills, past and present.
With Underground Railroad finished, he had the choice to get back to his crime novel, Harlem Shuffle, or start Nickel Boys.
He decided, at the time, Nickel Boys felt more urgent.
“Donald Trump had just been inaugurated and I, as a citizen, was sort of wondering, Is America headed in the right direction? The wrong direction? Should I believe that we’re getting better as a country, or will we always have these sort of terrible people living among us who will tear us down?”
He was drawn to the philosophical dilemma of his two main characters in Nickel Boys. Turner is cynical. Elwood’s sense of justice makes him hopeful that if someone learns the truth about Nickel it will be closed.
Unfortunately, the monsters in Tallahassee, where the novel is set, haven’t stopped pretending.
Deception is explored more warmly in Harlem Shuffle, but no less thoroughly.
The idea for the heist novel came about after a movie rental dilemma.
Whitehead was about to rent Oceans 11 for the umpteenth time and started to wonder about the fun the writers must have had.
He wanted in, and so he invented Ray Carney, an upstanding salesman of “gently-used” furniture, providing for his family, and trying to prove himself worthy to his in-laws.
For me, it was the moment Carney swore at his mother-in-law his own mask slipped, and his deeper struggle – figuring out who he is as both an ambitious family man and a crook’s son – was revealed.
“Part of the fun of the book is sort of breaking down or narrating the way he embraces different parts of himself, rejects them.”
Whitehead wanted a “fence” as a protagonist, a role often dished to supporting characters.
While researching, he discovered these middlemen for the “real criminals” often had stores where they worked legitimately, taking care of crooked business at the back.
Whitehead says this spoke to Carney’s “divided nature”.
“So Ray becomes someone who wants to enter into the middle class, have an upstanding establishment, raise a family, have a nice house, but has a part of him that’s always saying, ‘Let’s do some crimes’,” Whitehead says.
Carney is pulled into the criminal scene unwillingly, and the question of choice arises.
Colson Whitehead is looking forward to his trip to be part of Auckland’s Writers Festival. Photo / Supplied
“He’s forced to, you know, think about who he actually is. Is he this upstanding person, or is he crooked? Is he a criminal?”
The book is rich with characters like Carney.
“It’s not just the street-level criminals who are engaged in illegal activities, but the black bankers uptown, the white real-estate moguls on Wall Street, and so he’s a corrupt person among a sort of larger cohort of corruption. And you know we’re thinking, how bad are his crimes compared to what else is going on around him?”
Whitehead has a keen sense of place. His recreation of New York in the 60s is vibrant and thrumming and honest. Ray acknowledges the bones beneath the sidewalks, beneath “the playgrounds, the meadows, the silent groves”.
“The coloured citizens of Seneca were property owners, they voted, they had a voice. Not enough of one. The city of New York seized the land, razed the village, and that was that. The villagers dispersed to different neighbourhoods, to different cities where they might start again, and the city got its Central Park.”
These are the crimes Carney ponders on, putting “fencing” into perspective.
Whitehead will follow up the heist novel with Crook Manifesto – his 11th book – in July. He plans on finishing the trilogy with Carney’s escapades in the eighties, making it a one-man, three-decade saga.
How does he move from project to project?
Simple: “All artists have to have that inner drive that you know tells them to keep going, whether it’s on to the next poem or next painting.”
He also works with an assumption that no one cares if he’s working or not, and an unpublished first manuscript in a drawer for good measure – a plug in his creative socket, generating drive.
Whitehead credits this story, about a former child star in Hollywood, and its lack of publication, with making a real writer out of him.
“[The manuscript] was not really good. But I think that’s when I became a writer. I think once that book didn’t go anywhere, I had to ask myself, why am I doing this? You know? What do I want to do with my life, and the answer was, just keep writing. No one else would write the books I want to write.
“Nobody was going to do that for me, so I had no choice but to start again.”
