Vinson: Welcome to Critics at Large, the podcast from The New Yorker. I'm Vinson Cunningham. 
Naomi: I'm Naomi Fry. 
Alex: And I'm Alex Schwartz. Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here. Hello, my friends. Hello. 
Naomi: Hello, my friends. 
Vinson: What's 
Alex: up? A pleasure as always to see your wonderful faces here in the studio.
Vinson: Here we are. 
Alex: Well, I think you probably will agree with me when I say that this has been a banner year for New York City. We've got Zoron, we've got the Knicks- Woo ... and that chip. 
Vinson: Yeah. 
Alex: And we've got one of the great bards of New York, to my mind, Colson Whitehead. Whitehead is really a literary giant of our time.
It's indisputable at this point. We've talked about him a little bit on the show before. We did an episode about uses of the first person in art, where we talked about the adaptation of his novel, The Nickel Boys. Um, and he's won two Pulitzers, actually back to back, which I think makes that fact all the more remarkable, one for The Nickel Boys and another one for his previous novel, The Underground Railroad.
His books really run the gamut in terms of setting, subject matter, genre, style. How would you guys describe him as a writer?
Naomi: As smooth as the running water 
Vinson: He- 
Naomi: Does that make sense? 
Vinson: No, it makes sense. I don't know. Yeah. He, it, he is sentence to sentence, page to page very smooth and, and his ideas kind of float up at you in a certain way. Yeah. I know exactly what you mean. 
Naomi: Yeah. 
Vinson: That there's like, uh ... He is really good at making, at making you think things without f- forcing- 
Naomi: Mm-hmm
Vinson: your neck in a certain direction. 
Naomi: Mm-hmm. 
Vinson: And I think along those lines, I, I'd call him, like, a dead serious ironist. I think he's, like, in some ways the great Gen X writer. Yeah. He's got this, like, he wears everything very loosely and is able to take on very serious subject matter that he cares about a lot and still be really kind of aloof from it emotionally, um, ironic, and just funny.
He's one of our funniest novelists. It's not, I mean, the list doesn't go beyond one hand and he's on it, so that mix of seriousness and humor is, that's the mix for me with Colson Whitehead. 
Alex: I totally agree. I think there's, um, there's an undertow quality to his writing where you put a foot in and you're in.
Yeah. And you, you just, you wanna dip a toe and there you are. You're suddenly sucked into the whole ocean of the book. He is, um, exceptionally gifted at moving you right into the heart of whatever story he's chosen to put you in, and I think that's one of the qualities that explains his major popularity.
Um, you know, he's in that rare category also of being really critically lauded and also just a n- a novelist who many readers delight in reading. For the past few years, Whitehead has been working on what he calls his Harlem Trilogy, which is a crime series full of twists and turns that mirror the contemporary history of New York. And so there's been a big anticipation building around his new book, which is called Cool Machine. It's the final installment in the Harlem Trilogy, and so this felt like the perfect occasion for us to do an episode all about Colson Whitehead,. His life and his work, through the lens of a few novels in particular, which were chosen for us by a special in house expert who happens to be our special guest. I always love doing these because it gives me personally, selfishly, an opportunity to go deeper often- Yeah ... into someone whose work I might know but, and in no way a completist on, and that was the case here for- Mm-hmm Colson Whitehead. It's just, it's fun to learn something new.
Naomi: It really is. I feel that's so true, Alex. It's f- it's fun to read for a purpose where it's like, book club, you know, we're gonna share. We're gonna read something. Each of us is gonna read something new. Yeah. And we're gonna come and we're gonna share and we're gonna learn.
Alex: Yeah. we love to learn. So that's today on Critics at Large, Colson Whitehead's Case for the Novel.
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So as we mentioned, we have the help of an expert this week, a dear friend of the pod who's making his on-air debut, and he's entering the studio as we speak. Julian Lucas, get in here to Critics at Large. 
Naomi: Come on in, Julian 
Alex: Oh, we should, we should mention the door is extremely 
Naomi: heavy. The door is really heavy.
Julian is struggling to make his, to force his way in, and here he is. Wow. Yeah. 
Julian: I made it. It's- Here he is. It's a door. It's a door. Thank 
Naomi: God. Here he 
Julian: is. I'm, I'm so excited to be here. Um- Hi, 
Naomi: Julian. 
Julian: I had a very Colson Whitehead morning because the, the elevator in, uh, my building is broken, and I took the subway.
So- Oh. 
Naomi: You needed an- Wow ... you needed an inspector. 
Julian: Yes. Yes. Exactly. Okay. 
Alex: Julian, just to introduce you to our listeners, you are a fellow New Yorker staff writer. You write a lot about literary figures, and you've spent the last few months profiling Colson Whitehead. Your piece is called Colson Whitehead's Big Score, and it is very much out now.
I loved this profile. This was just a- So good ... this was just a ride. 
Julian: Thank you so much. Going into it, I actually did worry, "Will there be anything for me to discover, anything to say?" Because he, he is so famous, and he's done so much press.
Mm-hmm. Uh, but, but he hadn't done something that was this in depth before, and he was also willing to kind of open up about some of the life experiences behind his fiction as well. So I, I felt very lucky. 
Alex: There's a really great moment in this piece, uh, the opening of the piece. Um, it's like one of those openings that a reporter really dreams of or one of those reporting moments you dream of because it encapsulates so much.
He's, Colson has invited you. I call him Colson 'cause I figure that's what you call him, but he's- I don't know him. Um, he's invited you to meet him at what he calls his office- 
Julian: Mm-hmm ... 
Alex: um, in, in uptown Manhattan, and it's just a park bench, and he's sitting there. And- ... to me, that captures something Vinson was mentioning before.
Yeah Edgy, ironic, cool, but also kind of a warmth and goofiness. Yeah. Um, what was that 
Julian: like for you? It, it shades into the dad joke a little bit. Yeah. 
Naomi: It shades into 
Julian: the dorky, 
Naomi: for sure. 
Julian: Uh, yes. Yes. Which he's, he's, you know, childhood player of Dungeons and Dragons- Yes ... and lover of Star Wars, so he's, he's, he's a dork as well as a, uh, a very cool writer.
Naomi: How did you first encounter Colson Whitehead? Do you recall- Mm-hmm ... like, what your first moment of contact with one of his works was? What's the first book that you read, or when did you hear about him first? 
Julian: I do remember pretty clearly. Uh, it was, uh, in 2014 when I first moved to New York City. Uh, and my older sister, who's a longtime New Yorker and big Colson Whitehead fan said, "You have to read, uh, Colossus of New York," uh- Oh, cool
which is a lesser-known one of his works, so it deserves to be better known. It's, it's a collection of 13 essays, uh, about life in New York City. Uh, and I read it. Um, the, the most famous observation he, he makes in it is, uh, that you, you become a real New Yorker when something you've seen and loved before disappears, and you walk by it and you say, uh, "That used to be this business," or- Mm.
Yeah ... or, or that building. And, and I remember when I was reading it, this happened to me because I, I went to Port Authority to, to take the bus, uh, to, to go visit my parents in New Jersey, and there was a little bookstore right by where they sold tickets for the bus. Uh, and one day it was just gone. Mm. You know, there, there was no longer a little bookseller selling Penguin Classics in Port Authority, and I was like, "This is what he's talking about."
Yeah. So, um, and, and from there, I, I just became, uh, a big fan of his work. 
Alex: Julian, I'm curious, um, what you think makes Colson Whitehead so interesting as a writer. 
Julian: I am always, a- as you know me and you, Vincent, already brought up, I'm always mesmerized by his tone- Mm-hmm ... which I, I spent a lot of time trying to kind of epitomize in, in- Mm-hmm ... the piece. I think I landed on, uh, hypnotic insouciance.
Because often he starts with kind of some concept that he's writing almost a mock essay about, you know, like in The Harlem Trilogy, he talks about dorvay, this period of time when you wake up in the middle of the night. Oh, my God. I highlighted 
Vinson: that. I love that. Yeah. 
Julian: And he has this way of kind of almost like a stand-up comedian drawing you into this playful patter of tossing a concept around and, and, and, and riffing on it.
And then almost your d- your guard goes down, your defenses go down, and that's when he hits you with something, uh, that grabs you emotionally or that pulls you into a story. Mm-hmm. And, and I, I, I think that that, you know, he's, he's so often praised for the breadth of what he can do, the variety of what he c- he can do in terms of genre, but I've always been impressed with just on the sentence level in his prose, the way that he moves between registers is- Mm-hmm
there are very few writers who can do that. 
Alex: So Julian, a week ago, you gave each of us an assignment. You picked three books that you felt could give us all a sense of Whitehead and his work. And before we dive into those books, I was wondering if you could explain- Mm-hmm ... your very scientific methodology and, um-
and what you were thinking when you made those assignments. 
Julian: Well, it was, it was very painful, uh, to, to narrow it down to three. but I'm feeling good about my selections. 
Alex: Oh, good. 
Julian: So I chose, uh, The Underground Railroad, uh, because it is the book that catapulted him, again, from literary celebrity to more mainstream celebrity.
It, it arrived at kind of, uh, a moment in American politics and culture where people were interested in slavery and its aftermath in a way that seemed very immediate. And, and the way that he approached that history spoke uniquely to the moment, uh- The second one I chose was Sag Harbor. Uh, that was your assignment, right, Vincent, or me?
Me. We switched. Oh, no, it was your- We did a little switcheroo. Okay. You switched. You switched. Okay. Um- 
Vinson: But it was my on-ramp into Colson Whitehead, so I'm very, yeah, I wanna know why. 
Julian: I, I picked Sag Harbor because personally I think it's his most beautiful book. Some of his other books have more bells and whistles or, or they might have a bigger political intellectual project, but Sag Harbor is just a beautiful coming of age novel, and it's his most personal novel.
You know, he, he said when it came out, Sag Harbor, that it was a semi-autobiographical novel. Yeah. And, and he basically told me, "Yeah, well, I'll, I'll tell you now that it's been 15 years-" "... everything in the book pretty much happened." 
Vinson: Yeah. 
Julian: Uh, and then my final selection, uh, was Harlem Shuffle, and I picked that because, you know, it's the first book of, of this, this trilogy that he's just ended.
Uh, but I, I, I also think in this trilogy he has synthesized a lot of what is unique about his writing, uh, and about his interests. And I also feel that the reception to Underground Railroad and Nickel Boys created an image of Colson Whitehead in the public mind that was very much concerned with reckoning with American history and race and injustice.
And it's not wrong, it's not incorrect of those books, but it's not necessarily representative of the whole sweep of his career. And, and in The Harlem Trilogy, he kind of balances that interest in American history and in race, which, you know, plays out in his, his story of New York City. Uh, but it's also very funny.
It's, it's full of capers. Yeah. Uh, it's, it's full of all of the little quirks that, that make him delightful in, in his, his earlier books as well. So, so that's why I picked those three. 
Alex: Well, let's- Beautiful ... get into it. 
Naomi: Let's do 
Alex: it. If that doesn't whet your appetite- ... what will, I ask you? What will? Um, let's start with The Underground Railroad.
Nomi? Yes. This was your reading selection. Will you please introduce it to us? 
Naomi: Yes. You know, it's interesting. I had never read it. This was a first read for me. I knew it was about a kind of a literalized underground railroad in 19th century- Uh, slavery era America, antebellum. Um, and I remember, like, hearing, "Oh, it's like magical realism," right?
And when I hear magical realism, I am, as my, my co-hosts know, I am not a magical realism person. I'm not a fantasy person. I am, you know, I am a realism person. But I, you know, obviously I, I was ... I had the assignment, right? And I was eager to, to learn more, and I read it, and I was so ... Again, this is, like, a Pulitzer-winning novel.
Doesn't need me to say, "This is fantastic," but I will still say this is fantastic. I was absolutely riveted, impressed. Uh, it's the story of Cora, who is a young slave in Georgia on a, a cotton farm. When the book begins, Cora is a, is a girl of, of 10 or so. Her mother escapes. Cora then becomes kind of a stray on the farm, right?
She is-- she has no protector. She's mistreated. She's kind of treated as maybe a little bit crazy. Uh, at one point, another slave on, on the farm, Caesar, a boy named Caesar, asks her to run away- Mm-hmm ... with him, and reveals to her the existence of this actual Underground Railroad. And there begins... It's a kind of picaresque, right?
Mm-hmm. There begins, like, Cora's tale of kind of, like, passing from state to state, unimaginable adventures that are mostly harrowing. 
Alex: Nomi, is there a passage that, um, for you brings out some of these qualities that you're talking about? 
Naomi: Oh, my goodness. I mean- So, so here's a passage that I think really speaks to this, um, uh, very m- special brand of magical realism that, uh, Whitehead pursues in this, in this book, and it's when Cora and her associate Caesar, um, go down into the actual Underground Railroad for, for the first time.
Okay. "The stairs led onto a small platform. The black mouths of the gigantic tunnel opened at either end. It must have been 20 feet tall, walls lined with dark and light-colored stones in an alternating pattern. The sheer industry that had made such a project possible. Cora and Caesar noticed the rails.
Two steel rails ran the visible length of the tunnel, pinned into the dirt by wooden cross ties. The steel ran south and north, presumably, springing from some inconceivable source and shooting toward a miraculous terminus. Someone had been thoughtful enough to arrange a small bench on the platform. Cora felt dizzy and sat down.
Caesar could scarcely speak. 'How far does the tunnel extend?' Lumbly shrugged. 'Far enough for you.' 'It must have taken years.' 'More than you know. Solving the problem of ventilation, that took a bit of time.' 'Who built it?' 'Who builds anything in this country?' Cora saw that Lumbly relished their astonishment. This was not his first performance.
Caesar said, 'But how?' 'With their hands, how else?'" One thing that really struck me is that despite this kind of fantastical element of it, there is a kind of realness- Mm-hmm, 
Vinson: mm ... 
Naomi: or honesty to what you're reading that doesn't feel fanciful, like superfluously fanciful, I guess I would say. Which is what sometimes bothers me when I think of kind of like magical realism.
Oh, and then suddenly, you know, like a, a wind blew up and a, and a voice spoke, you know. It's not like that. The, the grain of it is so convincing and so- It's really grounded ... gripping and so grounded. Yeah. And I don't know that I've read many books, uh, especially the first half of this book, that, um, convey the absolute horror of what it f- Mm
must have felt like to be a slave, and to be among other slaves. It's really, really impressive, convincing, harrowing. And again, kind of like grounded and measured. 
Julian: I wanna just talk a little bit about, uh, your reaction that you're not a fan of fantasy- 
Naomi: Mm-hmm, 
Julian: mm-hmm ... usually. Mm-hmm. And you were, you were surprised by the fact that everything still felt so real.
Mm-hmm. You, you felt that the history was not diminished by the fact. No, 
Naomi: not at 
Julian: all. And, and, and I think this gets to the fact that this is really, a very unique book, but it's also in a tradition, uh, of what's been called, uh, the neoslave narrative. Many of our listeners probably have read Octavia Butler's Kindred- Mm-hmm ... or Toni Morrison's Beloved, or maybe even Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada. Hmm. And these are all books that use a fantastical element, uh, not to necessarily create an alternate history, uh, but to dramatize the way that the history of slavery lingers or is, is present, uh, in the contemporary era as well.
And what Colson does that's so interesting in The Underground Railroad is this, this device of a literal railroad that runs between states. and each state kind of represents a phase in American history, uh, and also a phase in American White supremacy and the resistance against it. and what Colson is trying to do by putting all of these together is kind of push back against this, uh, narrative that you often see in fiction about slavery, where it's a story of from slavery to freedom. It's, it's a, it's a kind of narrative of uninterrupted progress when in reality, historically- white supremacy reformed itself over and over again.
Mm-hmm. And, and so the device of the Underground Railroad, it becomes almost like a dark carnival ride that, that takes you through all of these, these different phases. And, and I think that also gets to why it was so popular when it came out. Uh, so it was published in 2016 at the tail end of the Obama administration. There was a, an enormous upsurge of interest in the history of slavery in Obama's second term, uh- We had movies like Django Unchained and, and 12 Years a Slave that were big box office hits. Michelle Obama was saying on stage, you know, "I wake up every day in a house that was built by slaves." and, and people were beginning to talk about the prospect of, of reparations. Uh, seems like a very long time ago now. Uh, and, and, and, and this was the kind of context in which the book came out. Uh, and then Donald Trump was elected on this wave of white nationalist backlash And, and there was a feeling that the book's emphasis on it's not a straight path from slavery to freedom, but there are always...
It's more like a sine wave. Mm-hmm. And, the way that the novel makes that part of its narrative structure, uh, really spoke to that moment of whiplash. 
Alex: Vincent, I know that you've read The Underground Railroad. Yeah. Did you read it when it came out? Did you read it later? What was your experience of reading it? 
Vinson: I read it when it came out. You know, what, the, the other thing that I really remember from that time, I feel like it was reviewed as a novel that it totally, it, it wasn't. It was reviewed as more- Mm-hmm ... kind of, um, uh, serious and downtrodden than it was. I think people wanted to read all of the, that history and contemporary history into it. Um, but it's so funny, and the other thing that it can do, because it, as you mentioned, um, it goes to all these different places, this episodic picaresque, is that, um, it plays to one of Whitehead's strengths, which is the set piece.
Mm-hmm. He's, he's in, he's in many ways like a great sketch comic writer. Um, he can just Throw himself at a situation, get in, get out. My favorite is Cora, at one of her stops, becomes the sort of lead actor in this place that's called- Yeah ... the Museum of Natural Wonders, I believe. I 
Julian: just pulled up that passage.
Vinson: And, and so, like, she is, uh, at, like, imagine it as, like, a natural history museum. She's behind the glass, and she's inhabiting all of these, like, um, steps- A slave boy and a- ... and the, like, the history of the race. Yeah. One is, like, scenes from darkest Africa. One is, like, you know, life in the slave hold. And then she f- what I, I think is really interesting, and this is maybe the most autobiographical moment in the book, she goes into every day on a slave plantation, her, her previous life, and she says, "Well, you know," or, or at least the narrator, the narrator, uh, sort of scraping through her mind says, "Well, she couldn't really talk about the Africa thing or the slave ship hold, but here, uh, every day," uh, she had notes.
Like, she, this- She was the expert on this, and she could say, you know, she offered her critiques. And one way to read Whiteheads, or if you wanna, like, check it out autobiographically, this is why I love Your Profile 'cause it t- talks so much about his problem with his dad, and symbolically, to me, that means, like, the Gen X Black artist's contention with the Civil Rights generation.
Julian: Mm-hmm. Mm. 
Vinson: The, the, the, that made- Absolutely ... a Black bourgeois, a, a Black bourgeoisie even possible, people like his father, and trying to deal with this great rock of history, this heroic telling of Black history, and sort of like, you know, loosen it up a little bit. And so, um, this i- this, like, idea that even in a, a, a museum you can't, the, the past is irretrievable, and it never lives up to the, you know, our representations of it.
Mm-hmm. Um, it just seemed to me to be about his trouble as a Black writer and how to, how to engage with this material, which he almost feels that he has to, in a way that, like, doesn't further heroize or, or, or m- make it more mythic, but kind of can bring it down to a, a, a more common denominator. 
Alex: When we're back, we'll dive into Colson Whitehead's most personal novel. This is Critics at Large from The New Yorker
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Alex: I think I'm going next. 
Julian: Okay. 
Alex: I'm here with Sag Harbor. Um, this novel was published in 2009, and I had never read it before. Of course, that's why it was assigned to me. I loved it. I loved it. It's great that we're recording this episode in July because this is, this is one of the great- greatest books I've read about summer, and the experience of summer, and the excitement and beauty and briefness, that little butterfly season, which has its death baked into it from the moment it starts.
Mm. The anxiety of the end of summer that comes with the delight of the beginning of summer. All of that is here in Sag Harbor. Um, Sag Harbor is structured in a really also very accessible and interesting way. You wanna read it from the beginning 'cause you wanna know who the characters are, and you wanna know all about Benji Cooper, who, you know, is Colson Whitehead with his little brother, um, who's just a year younger than him, tagging along in Sag Harbor where they spend their summers.
But you can really just open it up almost to any chapter and plunge into the world of working at the summer ice cream shop, um, and what the smell of sugar will do to you after even 20 years after you've worked in a place like that. The memories that come flooding back. Uh- His 
Vinson: description of the smell is one of my strongest memories of reading that book.
Alex: Yeah. It's, it's, it's pungent. 
Julian: So that ice cream shop, Alex, is still there. It's called Big Olaf's, and I, I tried to get him to go in, but the, the memory of making so many waffle cones and the smell, he just, he couldn't bring himself. He, he crept up to the threshold, but couldn't bring himself to go in.
Alex: There's so many things I loved about this book. The book is narrated by Benji Cooper, who now is a grown-up, but is looking back on this time when he went to his family's house in Sag Harbor, which he used to do every summer. A Black enclave in the Hamptons, which is its own world. There are constantly references to, like, something else out there.
If you keep going that way, you'll get to West Hampton. If you go even farther than that, you'll get to the end of the world. Mm-hmm. Um, and right at the start of the book, Benji is in the car with his little brother Reggie and his parents, and they're driving out, and there's this sense of anticipation and excitement.
It's almost like going to Narnia. Like, the other world is there. But one thing that's really distinctive and notable about the book is that, um- The parents are almost never around. The parents go to the city a lot, they're in the city a lot, and this is like, you know, this just really brought me smack into the middle of a mystical world I've only heard of.
The latchkey kid generation. 
Julian: Absolutely. 
Alex: these kids are alone at the beach house for days at a time. And of course, this is a very hot commodity, the parent-free house. This takes place at a pretty pivotal summer in Benji's life, if for no other reason than he's really y- you know, growing up, Um, there's a passage I wanna share that gets This is such a well-observed book. You almost feel like Colson Whitehead was taking literal notes his entire teenage years- Yeah ... because he brings you back in such detail. Um, but this just gets at two things, the passage I wanna read. One is, like, sociologically, the experience that he's describing of being a Black kid, seeing how other Black kids do things.
They're talking a lot about, like, you know, are you too street? Are you not street enough? Mm. Like, authenticity, all those kinds of questions. He goes to a majority white school, private school, as Colson Whitehead did, and suddenly you have something to prove, or do you? But he's talking about when his friends are doing handshakes.
Handshakes are in. 
Julian: I love this part. 
Alex: These elaborate, like, handshakes- ... to show that you know what's up. And he's looking at them as if they're performing, like, a ballet he doesn't know the steps to, because he doesn't know what this is. And so he's on the beach, and two of his friends were here Randy was up on his feet.
NP said something outrageous. His arms spun in deep anecdote theatrics, and then I saw something strange. The three of them were laughing, and then NP extended his hand, and Randy put his hand out, and the hands grew closer, almost in slow-mo, and then I could see it, even from that distance, as if I had binoculars, the most botched handshake of the day.
NP approached serpentine, attempting to replicate the pump and dump that Bobby had used on him, adding a wiggle closer, but Randy was expecting something else entirely, going with a fingertip pull, double squeeze, before winding up with a shoulder-to-shoulder manly half hug. They recovered, and NP continued his story, Bobby nodding in enthusiasm.
It was unmistakable. Everybody was faking. And that is high school. Yes. Everybody's faking it. I just loved that close attention to the handshake. And of course, these guys don't mention it to each other. They just, like, bump and move on. Um, so Julian, I know, you know, you've said this, this is this autobiographical book, among other things There's no way you're recalling this kind of detail unless you lived it. 
Vinson: Yeah. 
Alex: Like, God bless if you can invent these radio stations and, like- ... you know, beautiful, specific summary details, but, like, it's, it's, it's in, it's in the, it's in the blood. It's in, it's in the mind. Um, but there, there are a lot of really melancholy notes in this book- Mm-hmm
as well, uh, that have to do with the family of Benji. They're gone most of the time. He's also trying to kind of separate from his brother. They're, they've been like twins their whole lives 'cause they're so close in age. Now they're really forming their own identities. Um, and I was just wondering if your conversations with Colson led you to make any connections between- Mm-hmm
his life, his family's life, and the way he depicts things in the book at this moment where his family, the nuclear family is For obvious reasons, kind of splitting up. The kids are getting older, they're gonna leave, but stuff is going on, clearly. 
Julian: Yeah. Uh, great question, and, and this is one of the things I, I, I asked him about most, uh, in, in reporting this.
Uh, so we learn late in the novel that Benji has a very difficult relationship with his father, uh, who at one point asks him about, uh, a white boy in school who has made a racist remark toward him and, and, uh, he learns that Benji did not defend himself. Uh, so he makes Benji stand up, and he punches him. And he, he says, "Now you don't have to be afraid, and you can stick up for yourself next time because, you know-" Mm-hmm. "Uh, no white boy at school can hurt you kind of worse than I can," is, is the kind of message. And, and so you, you, you get a sense of the, the, the, the dark side of, of this sort of Black bourgeois world, uh, in that it's a world of people who have made it in a racist society, uh, through an extraordinary amount of, of discipline and, and also often having to adhere to a certain kind of respectability.
Uh, so, so at the heart of this otherwise bright, summery novel is this sort of darkness. And when I started asking Colson about it, uh, he, he told me that this basically was a, a, a portrait of his own father and his own family growing up. His dad did struggle with alcoholism Uh, so I think that growing up, he had to be very controlled. Uh, he, he had to bring home good grades, uh, and he had to kind of avoid his father's anger. And, and one interesting thing that I learned in writing the profile is that he, he started writing Sag Harbor actually after he became estranged from his father. One day he just said, you know, "Enough," and, and stopped talking to his dad, who at this point was living full time in Sag Harbor. Uh, and so Colson actually kept going out to Sag Harbor because he had another relative with a house there, and he actually wrote the novel at this aunt's house in Sag Harbor.
Uh, but the whole time, his father was just a few blocks away, which I was just kind of shocked to learn. He, he's, he's kind of excavating his childhood and his relationships with his father and brother, and his, his, his father is just, like, steps away. And this is one of the things I asked him about most in reporting this, his personal life and what role that’s played in his fiction and his career as a writer. 
Alex: Vincent, you're up, 
Vinson: happy to be up. 
Alex: Happy to have you up. You're bringing us up to the Colson Whitehead of today. Introduce Harlem Shuffle if you will. 
Vinson: So it's, it's such a great, Harlem Shuffle and the trilogy that, um, ensues, it's such a great example of, uh, Whitehead's art. Uh, this most recent endeavor of Whitehead's is a trilogy, uh, of crime novels concerning a man named Ray Carney, who I've come to love. He is a, you could call him a small-time crook, but more importantly, he has a sort of, uh, crookedness in his heart that he cannot totally get rid of.
He is, on the one hand, Carney, the owner of a very respectable furniture shop on 125th Street. And if you know anything about New York and its history, 125th Street is the gr- the great artery of Harlem. To have a storefront on 125th Street is to be visible, uh, in, in, in Black society in the most important way.
It's like having the, the flagship of your f- fashion company on Madison Avenue or something like that. Anyway, at the same time, he is what, what's called a fence, which is a, an intermediary between the straight world, as they call it, and the world of criminality. And so Carney becomes, because of his, you know, mixture, his heart mixture of the legit world and the underworld, a great observer of one of the objects of Whitehead's career-long gaze, New York City. Uh- This twoness, this doubleness in Carney's character is symbolized in the first novel, Harlem Shuffle, um, by what he calls the dorvais. Mm-hmm. Um, which of course, in the French, it, it means like this, this, this in-between state of sort of, um, waking, an intermission in sleeping. Uh, someone who goes to sleep at a regular hour, like a nice, respectable, middle-class person, but then you wake back up at midnight, and you have these hours.
And he's, and, and these are, like, the crooked hours for him. Uh, and he sort of looses himself on the s- on the streets, sort of, you know, somebody might bring him a necklace, and he's gotta go find out who to get it to. Is it hot? Is somebody looking for it? Anyway, the, uh, one of the great culminations of the book is, um, a heist involving the Hotel Theresa between 124th and 125th Street.
When I was a kid, uh, there was a, a, a White Castle on the ground level- ... of this block. I don't know if that White Castle, uh, is still there. It's still there. Is it still there? Okay, cool. Uh, across the street was a Citibank. I went 
Julian: there after the interview. 
Vinson: Did you? Across the street still is, I believe, the Citibank.
It's all connected. Yeah, there's a Citibank that I used to always go, like, sort of on my mother's, uh, like, swishing in my mother's skirts, you know? She'd take me to the Citibank. Aw, little Vincent. So I still, so, you know. We get 
Julian: pictures. 
Vinson: Yeah. It's a beautiful, uh, it's a beautiful building. And, uh, characteristically, he sort of takes this great totem of a place and turns it totally inside out.
Um, I would, maybe in, to, to, to sort of off- offer a passage, I will read a little bit of the, um, the dorvais business. He's sort of recounting all of the sort of respectable applications of the term. Benjamin Franklin enthused over Dorvay in his diaries, using the intermission to walk around the house naked and sketch inventions.
Learned gentleman aside, Carney knew crime's hours when he saw them. Dorvay was crooked heaven when the straight world slept and the bent got to work. An arena for thieving and scores, break-ins and hijacks, when the con man polishes the bait and the embezzler cooks the books. In between things, night and day, rest and duty, the no good and the up and up.
Pick up a crowbar. You know the in-between is where all the shit goes down." Anyway, it's just such a beautiful... These three books have become such a, a beautiful index of New York City in its cycles of decline and resurgence. He talks about the bankruptcy of, of the city in the '70s eventually, and in the newest book, he talks about the ethos of development in the Koch, in the Koch era.
So it's just a great chronicle of New York, showing how, like, not only Black identity, but a certain form of middle-classness, regularity of the straight world are always kind of imperiled. And it also just collapses, as you said, Julianne, so many of his concerns. It's a real achievement, and to me, it stands in for something that we were talking about, which is that Whitehead singularly, I think, has become a very important writer without ever seeming to stretch for importance.
Alex: In a minute, Colson Whitehead's case for the novel. Critics at Large from The New Yorker will be right back
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We've been talking about three books by the writer Colson Whitehead, and I wanna take a step back and look at Whitehead's body of work as a whole. Why do we think people respond so powerfully to his novels? 
Naomi: it seems, I mean, this might be pretty basic, but it seems that he's extremely readable.
I mean, I don't know if that's something that we've talked about that explicitly, but from my experience reading his books, they just, they just- Mm-hmm ... go. You know what I mean? It's a, they are yarns. They are- Mm ... yarns, and the plot is propulsive, and the, the kind of like gravity of the ideas, um, and the concepts doesn't get in the way of like the basic joy of reading, of character and plot.
And, um, I, I think that's something that's worth noting. Because it's, it's not an easy thing, um, to be both a serious writer who grapples with, with, with history and relationships and, uh, psychology, and also is able to give the reader pleasure.
Julian: I think that's a, a great point, and, and he really is... It, it's funny because he's so famous for The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, and, uh, people have often approached him as someone who has a political project, who is reckoning with history.
But when I talked to him, I was really struck by the fact that his primary commitment is to fiction itself. Mm. He, he is a great storyteller- Yeah ... and, and storytelling is his priority always. And I, I do think that this is a characteristic of writers who, who are both kind of critical darlings and challenge our ideas about the world, but are also highly readable, is that they write books that you can read either way.
Yes. So I love in The Underground Railroad, it is possible to read it as, you know, a story of slavery to freedom, a kind of propulsive tale of the fugitives' journey. Uh, but if you are familiar with the tradition of the neo-slave narrative, or you're, you're thinking about the kind of oscillation within American history like Reconstruction, post-Reconstruction, Obama, Trump, then there is a kind of intellectual depth there in the way he's reflecting on history.
But you, it, you're, you're not being hit in the face with that. I, I, I also think just his combination of humor and, and seriousness is just, there, there are very few writers who can pull both of those off, not just in the same book- Mm ... but in the same paragraph and the same sentence. 
Naomi: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. 
Vinson: Yeah. 
Naomi: Mm-hmm.
Vinson: I, I think in connection with this, I love what you said about his primary Devotion, you know, his primary responsibility or felt responsibility being to the novel, I think that's so right. I was thinking, um, as you said that, I was thinking about an essay written by Jonathan Franzen way back in Harper's, and it's called Why Bother, I believe.
Naomi: Mm-hmm. 
Vinson: And it's about the contest, the sort of deepening, worsening maybe, contest between the novel and other forms of media, particularly like image-based forms of media, which obviously has, this has only- Intensified ... accelerated in our day. Yeah. And he's trying to lay forward this big question about why would somebody pick up a novel instead of watching TV.
You know, what is the, what is the value proposition if you wanna get, you know, if you're nasty, of, of the novel. And it seems to me that even though Franzen laid down that question, Whitehead, I think, is the writer who has tried to answer it most fully. It's funny, uh, 'cause we, we thought our last episode, or no, two episodes ago now, uh, was about The Odyssey, and I was, I think, thought about like how Christopher Nolan has like- addressed himself to everything in a certain way.
Hmm. And like, there is a certain Christopher Nolan-ness of the way that, uh, Whitehead attacks his subjects and genres. He wants to see how far, uh, literary fiction can stretch, how much, how much of a sort of culture-encompassing tarp it can become. 
Julian: Hmm. 
Vinson: And so I think, I mean, the, I mean, I think his importance is in that the, the seriousness, even in humor, of that effort.
Julian: An- another kind of Nolan parallel is just that Colson has just had such great timing throughout his career. So like early on when he did The Intuitionist and John Henry Days, there was a lot of talk of genre-bending, like literary writers who, who are, you know, writing mystery novels and- Yeah ... noirs and talking about superheroes, and he was squarely within that.
Then when he published Sag Harbor right after Barack Obama was elected, there was a lot of talk of what, uh, you know, the critic Touré called, uh, post-Blackness, which has not aged well as a term. No. But what it was trying to get at was there was, in the Obama era, a broader, uh, range of Black perspectives that people were, were seeking out.
And then he publishes The Underground Railroad and, uh, uh, The Nickel Boys on the cusp of the Trump era. And, and, and so, and now he finishes the Harlem Trilogy in the great year of New York. So he's, he's always been very- ... lucky when it comes to, to timing, and it's, it's contributed to his success. 
Vinson: Yeah.
Oksha, you, what, what, why do you think? 
Alex: I think these are all, um, I think you guys are right, basically. Hmm. I think you guys are right. I think, uh, the, the qualities that you're getting at, and that Nomi just summed up really well, is that there's something that reifies the value and the specific pleasure of reading when you read these books.
Yeah. And then when you can do that, you can go anywhere. You can write about anything you really wanna write about, as Colson Whitehead has done. Um, I do think that when I read him- You're just happy that you can read. That's a good- 
Naomi: That's so true, Alice ... that's a good feeling. I, I love that. It's such a good feeling, and especially in the context of what Vinson brought up, the why bother of it all, which as you noted, Vinson, has just gotten heightened and, and intensified.
Yeah. This kind of like, w- you know, after the book what? Or instead of the book what? You know- Mm-hmm ... like, there are all of these other options that seem increasingly poisonous, literally poisoning us, poisoning our eyes every single m- moment of the day, unless we make this choice to say, "Enough." Let us open this book, and it rewards you with, like, how lucky we are that we can still read, and that there are these books that are meant to be read.
Alex: Yeah, the, the, the sense of ease is deceptive, because there, a lot of, um, the writing is very fine bore, um, and is packed with specificity, and is full of rhythm, and very specific word choices, and a kind of glancing humor and irony. He's really a Gen X writer to me. That's, like, one of the biggest- 
Naomi: Mm-hmm. God bless.
Alex: Yeah, God bl- like, know me. I, you say it loud and say it proud. There it is. Um, that kind of sensibility, which we've talked on the show about missing a bit. Yeah. Like, the ironic detachment is there, but by someone who really cares. So you get both. 
Vinson: Yeah. 
Julian: He's so good at furnishing the world, which is why I feel like a furniture salesman-
was such a good choice for him. So true. Uh, and, and I feel like we're in an era in literary fiction, or at least we were, where there was a lot of very episodic, stripped down first person. And, and Colson is more in the, almost like the 19th century. He will tell you what the room looks like. He will invent entire lines of couch and, and coffee table, and, and, and he, he's so descriptively convincing, that I think he's always showing us what, uh- N- novels can do that maybe television and movies cannot 
Alex: Yeah, and to that point, um, in April he wrote an op-ed.
Did you guys read this for the Times about AI? 
Vinson: Oh, yeah. 
Alex: It's- So funny ... it's, like, really part and parcel with the anecdote we were talking about before, I think, with the park bench that begins Julie's profile- ... because it's funny, it's clever, and it's also, like, delightfully dad corny in a way. Um, and he's writing this op-ed.
It's called Don't Let- Don't Use AI to Do This, and the persona of the narrator of this essay, um, is someone who says he loves AI. He can't use it enough, and obviously it's all ironic. Um, and he has this part of this where he says, "Before you go, 'That's easy for you to say, Mr. High and Mighty who makes his p- own stuff,' let me assure you that I'm not trying to look down on anybody.
I understand wanting to offload the agony of artistic creation. Last year when I was finishing my book, I got stuck and went to The Gooch for help." The Gooch is his, uh, AI that he's claiming he uses.  "What is a novel anyway but a big pile of content?
The book is a crime story, so I devised a prompt about crooks and cops and city hall and corruption, the whole grubby mess, and let her rip." And then The Gooch gives him an answer that is just the opening narration of Law & Order. So he's, he's making a case in that essay for what humans can do, and many writers are making this, but the case, of course, is the books and the pleasure and uniqueness of them. OK I know what Colson Whitehead book I'm reading next.
W- I've been meaning to read it for a long time, but I'm now gonna read Harlem Shuffle, and I'm just gonna read through the trilogy, especially now that it's complete. That's so fun. I can do a bit of a binge. 
Vinson: So fun. 
Alex: I don't have to wait. So I- 
Naomi: I love a binge. 
Alex: I can't wait to, to hit that on the beach. Nomi, what about you?
Do you have a next queued up? 
Naomi: My answer is yours. 
Alex: Ooh. 
Naomi: Reading club. I, uh, I, I wanna read Harlem Shuffle. I love noir, like I love crime fiction, and just listening to you guys talk about it- 
Vinson: Yeah ... 
Naomi: reading from it, I'm, I'm psyched. I'm gonna start with Harlem Shuffle. 
Vinson: Yeah. I already know which one I'm starting because I started it a couple months ago and I was like, "No, I don't, I don't ever wanna finish Colson Whitehead." And it was, um, his second book, which I've actually never read in its, its fullness.
I read the first chapter, loved it. John Henry Days. 
Julian: Has some of the best media satire of, of any novel. He's, 
Vinson: the, the protagonist is a journalist who just tries to go on junkets to, to sort of get free lunch and free stuff, and but he's, uh, discovered this sort of festival, uh, in relation to the great sort of figure of myth, John Henry, and it's one of Whitehead's classic, as far as I could tell just from the first chapter, sort of take downs or re- reconfigurations of, um, the great deposit of Black history.
So I'm excited to check out John Henry Days. 
Alex: Well, Julian, you're a completist, and you can just sleep until the next novel comes out. 
Julian: Absolutely. 
Alex: Get some rest. You've earned it. Thank you- Sweet dreams ... sweet dreams. Thank you so much for coming to Critics. This was fantastic to have you here. Thank you. This 
Julian: has been so much fun.
Alex: This has been Critics at Large. Our senior producer is Rhiannon Corby, and Alex Barasch is our consulting editor. Our executive producer is Steven Valentino. Alexis Cuadrado composed our theme music, and we had engineering help today from Cran Bandy, with mixing by Mike Kuchman. You can listen to all of our episodes anytime at newyorker.com/critics