ANOTHER DEPARTURE
‘Summer of outrage’ influenced Whitehead’s grim, but funny, new novel
Five minutes before a huge public reading, one day after his new novel came out to riotous acclaim, a man who might well be considered the most lauded literary writer now working in the United States sat alone, almost unnoticed in the second row of his own event.
Colson Whitehead is a very particular kind of famous. He is the author of nine books — seven novels and two works of non-fiction — several of which have done quite well. He won a Macarthur “Genius Grant” in 2002 and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is even something of a name on Twitter. But Whitehead’s previous novel, The Underground Railroad, outpaced all of that. It was the kind of gigantic, career-defining success few writers ever enjoy. It won the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize and the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction. It vaulted Whitehead out of the ranks of popular, professional writers and into the rare air of true literary celebrity. When Time Magazine named Whitehead to its 100 Most Influential list in 2017, Oprah Winfrey wrote the blurb.
But literary celebrity is still, well, literary. Book-famous is the kind of famous that allows you to fill a giant event space in Toronto with paying fans but still lets you sit among those fans and be virtually unrecognized until the moment you’re called on stage. It’s also the kind of famous that allows fans to read a lot more into a writer from his work than might actually be there. That’s especially true in Whitehead’s case. The legions of readers who know him just from The Underground Railroad could be forgiven for expecting a Very Serious Writer prepared to deliver Very Important Ideas on stage. But that’s not Whitehead, not even close.
In Toronto that night, he wore a pink-and-blue striped T-shirt. Even when deadly serious, he always sounded half-joking (at least). At one point, an elderly woman asked him what it was like to be on the cover of Time, adding that she would likely never get there herself. “You could be in a school massacre,” Whitehead replied in a deadpan, there’s-always-hope tone.
Whitehead is facing down a problem that most other writers would kill to have. How do you follow up a book that made you tremendously famous (for a novelist) when that book is not all that representative of the rest of your career? (For one thing, he told Postmedia before the event that it’s the only one of his books that contains no jokes.)
His new book, Nickel Boys, is a departure in several ways from The Underground Railroad. That’s nothing new for Whitehead. Almost every book he’s written has been a departure, on some level, from what he’s done before.
Over the past 20 years, he’s published, among others: a neo-noir crime novel about an elevator inspector; a zombie novel; a loosely autobiographical masterpiece about coming of age in a vacation town on Long Island; and a non-fiction book about poker.
The Underground Railroad was an unflinching look at the unspeakable horrors of slavery. But it was also about a literal railroad that operated underground. (Hence the science-fiction prize.) Nickel Boys shares a broad theme with that book — as Whitehead says: “terrible people abuse innocents and they are never held accountable” — but that’s about it.
Set in Florida in the 1960s and New York closer to the present day, Nickel Boys follows the story of two boys incarcerated in the Nickel Academy, a home for the kind of kids a previous generation might have called “wayward” — minor convicts, runaways, the generally incorrigible. Nickel is a horror house, full of sexual and physical violence, but Whitehead based it on a very real place. The Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Fla., operated for more than 100 years. Abuse was rampant there, and deaths were common enough that the school had two graveyards, one official and one secret.
The school first came to attention in 2014, when a group of forensic archaeologists discovered the hidden graveyard. Whitehead read about it then and something about it stuck with him. It was the year of two racially charged killings that sparked public outcry — Michael Brown in Missouri and Eric Garner in New York. “It was a summer of outrage and feeling powerless against powerful and racist institutions,” Whitehead said. “I’m not sure if I had read the story three months before or three months later if it would have had the same impact.”
But something about the moment kept drawing him back, prodding him to write The Nickel Boys.
“It became more compelling after (Donald) Trump’s election,” he said. “I was just trying to figure out, for my own self, where I see the country going. Am I hopeful for what we’re doing? Am I despairing about where our country is going? Are we regressing?”
The novel tracks the intertwined lives of two boys from very different backgrounds. Elwood, a strait-laced high-school student and junior civil rights activist, gets arrested on his way to an extra-credit college course after hitching a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car. (That detail is based on the real story of Jerry Cooper, a former Dozier inmate.) Turner,
I was just trying to figure out, for my own self, where I see the country going. Am I hopeful for what we’re doing? Am I despairing about where our country is going? COLSON WHITEHEAD
a runaway and repeat Dozier prisoner, meets Elwood on the inside.
Whitehead chose Elwood as a main character for a very specific reason: “Because any young black man, young black woman could be picked up for being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he said. In his own life, Whitehead has been stopped and handcuffed and interrogated by the police. “That awareness and reality has always been a feature of my life,” he said. “So no one deserves to be in Dozier, and Nickel. And (Elwood) represents the sort of random person who is minding his own business and gets swept up, the way any young person of colour can get swept up.”
Canadian readers of Nickel Boys will be struck by the similarities between the Nickel Academy and real-life Canadian residential schools. Whitehead says he had never heard of residential schools before writing his book. But he has learned some about them, and other similar institutions in other countries since. The core lesson from all of them, inevitably, is the same: “The relationship between the powerful and the powerless plays out in a terrible way in every country.”
Nickel Boys ends with a twist and a sense of some circular, if limited, optimism. “I think all the descriptions of the book make it sound very grim, and it is very grim,” Whitehead said. “But it’s also the love between the two boys and how they try to make a life for themselves afterward.” The book is also, at times, tremendously funny. “I guess the general term is gallows humour,” Whitehead said. “How do you keep a sense of self in a terrible place? You make jokes and you try to control some of what’s around you.”
As for Whitehead himself, he said with a laugh that his “existential dilemma about where we’re going is probably more pronounced now than it was two years ago.” But he is also cautiously optimistic. “I talk about being paralyzed by the horror,” he said. “But looking at the 2018 elections, I think that energy translated into some advancement, and so despite a lot of evidence to the contrary, I think next year could be good.”
He stopped himself there and laughed. “I just broke my no predictions rule,” he said. “And now this will be on the internet.”