Chewing over the Big Apple
Colson Whitehead’s essays on his home town offer brilliant flashes of illumination.
Of all the sidewalk retailers waiting to make a buck in New York City, the cheap-umbrella hawkers are a special set, opportunists who rely on sudden downpours. Money changes hands, the umbrella is hoisted, a gust destroys it and it joins “the fallen in this struggle” in trash cans, “abandoned, black fabric rippling against split chrome ribs”.
The pain of rain in the Big Apple is addressed in Colson Whitehead’s The Colossus of New York, a reissued collection of essays on his home town. He soared into the literary stratosphere with his slave-era novel The Underground Railroad, which won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It was a harrowing, masterful work that he said he could never have tackled until he was more mature.
Now 48, he first published Colossus in 2003. This new paperback edition reveals a lighter, more freewheeling writer. It’s very New York: sharp, snappy and get-outta-my-way.
It’s no travelogue. In the introduction, he explains that each of the eight million people living in the ever-changing city has a “personal skyline”, which can never be fixed or defined. “What follows,” he writes, “is my city.”
The journey starts at the Port Authority, the point of entry for bus travellers. The trip to New York is long; the physical discomfort elevated by proximity to strangers. People keep yapping. Someone’s eating chicken. The narrative slides between nameless people, bored, anxious. A man in the loo looks in the mirror: “Is he actually going to start fresh with a face like that.” (Whitehead asks a lot of questions in Colossus, but never uses a question mark.) They reach “the biggest hiding place in the world … this time it will be different”.
“Morning” opens with the clarion call of garbage trucks grinding along the streets. Blessed be the snooze button before the citizens have to hit the streets and get to work. This guy’s jumper has holes. It’s snowing. He misses the bus. Think of what’s ahead for the kids: “If they knew it will always be like this, they would revolt … the only sane response, really.”
Whitehead takes us for a walk through Central Park: manure, wheelchairs, rollerbladers, skaters, “always some jerk on a unicycle”.
Down in “Subway”, people stand on the platforms and peer into the tunnels like “a psy-
Whitehead takes us for a walk through Central Park: manure, wheelchairs, rollerbladers, skaters, “always some jerk on a unicycle”.
chiatric disorder”. On board, it’s standing room only, but then one of the narrators spies an empty seat. “When you get there soda sloshes. At the next stop someone sits in it.”
Whitehead walks us along Broadway, Coney Island (“such a multitude of stenches it must be summer”) and Brooklyn Bridge (“Let’s pause a sec to be cowed by this magnificent skyline”).
He concludes by having tourists fly out from JFK, looking down at what they’ve just seen. “It was really something,” they will tell their friends. But what?
“Try to forget,” advises Whitehead. New York’s inscrutability is part of its mystique, but Colossus offers some brilliant flashes of
illumination.
THE COLOSSUS OF
NEW YORK, by Colson
Whitehead (Fleet $27.99)