Pulitzer Prize-winning author Colson Whitehead surprises and challenges readers with ‘Harlem Shuffle’
Ready to read the novelist’s latest? Twenty years of work help illuminate it.
When “The Intuitionist” arrived in 1999, Colson Whitehead’s debut novel was acclaimed for its unique blend of speculative fiction, noir-style mystery and allegory about race and America. Whitehead was a writer to watch, winning a MacArthur “Genius” award in 2002 a year after his second novel, “John Henry Days,” although it was still far from obvious that Whitehead would mature into one of America’s greatest novelists of the 21st century.
But on the eve of his latest novel, “Harlem Shuffle,” it’s clear that Whitehead is indeed part of the elite pantheon of writers who must be read to truly understand life in America. His is a vital and incisive voice on America’s distorted self-image and values, especially when it comes to creating a fair and just society, particularly on the subject of race.
Only four writers have won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction twice. Booth Tarkington may be largely forgotten today, but William Faulkner and John Updike remain literary lions, so when Whitehead, who was a finalist for “John Henry Days,” won Pulitzers for backto-back novels, “The Underground Railroad” (2016) and “The Nickel Boys” (2019), it further cemented an already stellar reputation.
While his sentence-to-sentence writing has always been brilliant, he is less showy than he was in a book like “Apex Hides the Hurt” (2006), and in his most recent work, the language serves both the story and his characters’ humanity. And while his genre-bending plots still push the boundaries of our imaginations — an actual train beneath the earth moves enslaved people to freedom in “Underground Railroad” — his work has become more tightly focused than the sprawl of “John Henry Days” but more overtly ambitious than “Sag Harbor” (2009) and “Zone One” (2011).
Still, even if “Underground Railroad” and “Nickel Boys” are his masterpieces (to date), all his novels are worthy, both as thought-provoking literature and page-turning reads. (A former journalist, Whitehead writes nonfiction, too: His slender collection of essays, “The Colossus of New York,” is worth grabbing if just for the opening piece, “City Limits,” which he wrote in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, and his book “The Noble Hustle” recounts his experience playing in the World Series of Poker.)
Here’s a brief primer of his eight novels, that, admittedly, won’t be nearly as powerful as just reading them.
“THE INTUITIONIST” (1999) >> In this novel, Lila Mae Watson is the first Black woman elevator inspector, a fact that is a real affront to the old ways. When a deadly accident happens on her watch, it seems she may have been set up and is forced into a dangerous investigation to clear her name. It’s a classic genre setup and Watson is the classic outsider, but it’s not at all what you’re expecting — this book is set in an alternate 1950s New York where elevators are at the forefront of society and the Elevator Inspector indispensable. The strange world-building and sometimes dense writing brought some comparisons to Thomas Pynchon and the allegorical take on what it takes to rise up or lift certain sections of society drew comparisons to Ralph Ellison, but the book succeeds because it is a riveting read, filled with suspense worthy of a Walter Mosley mystery.
“JOHN HENRY DAYS” (2001) >> Brimming with ideas, the book has a more diffuse narrative than most Whitehead novels. It examines the myth of John Henry, mostly through the eyes of a Black journalist, J. Sutter, attending a festival built around the legendary steel driver. But we also see the story through others: Paul Robeson, the daughter of a John Henry memorabilia collector, a blues musician and John Henry himself. It is not as taut as Whitehead’s debut, but despite the lack of a narrative engine, the novel finds its targets — race, writing, commercial exploitation and American mythology — often enough to make it worthwhile.
“APEX HIDES THE HURT” (2007) >> A sharply observed satire of American commercialism with attention paid to racial issues, the book revolves around a “nomenclature consultant.” His career creating names for consumer products has cratered but he gets called in for one big job, to help a town decide whether to change its name. And while the book is funny (and ironic: The main character has no name), for African Americans, whose family names were imposed on them through slavery, this topic is no laughing matter. The writing is sometimes too clever and the book feels cold and impersonal compared with Whitehead’s other novels, but it has plenty to say about identity issues in America.
An intimate coming-of-age story that clearly contains autobiographical elements, it also was Whitehead’s most humane and emotional story to date. While the humor in “Apex” can puncture, here it’s warmer. The protagonist, Benji Cooper, is Black and his well-off family lives in New York City. Set in the 1980s, and replete with the pop culture of the moment, it tells the story of Benji and his brother Reggie — stuck all year in a mostly white Manhattan prep school where Benji wears Brooks Brothers and listens to The Smiths — now that it’s time for summer vacation out on Long Island in a Black enclave surrounded by tony White towns. While Benji and his peers must never forget how they’re perceived by the White world, the anxiety over class and social standing within his own community takes center stage here. The book is being adapted into a series for HBO Max.
Whitehead followed the life-affirming sweetness and the languid pace of “Sag Harbor” by paying homage to Stephen King in this gripping and dark post-apocalyptic novel. After a virus wiped out much of America (which now, of course, simply sounds realistic), the book is filled with zombies before zombies had become the No. 1 go-to monster metaphor, but it’s more about what it takes to rebuild a civilization than it is a plotdriven story of survival ... even if rebuilding civilization means succumbing to the needs and desires not just of bureaucrats but of corporate sponsors. It’s worth noting that the more hopeful “Sag Harbor” came out right after Barack Obama’s election, while this grim tale came after reckless capitalism fueled The Great Recession that destroyed so many lives.
How can you write a book in the 21st century that will make Americans sit up and take notice of the true and lasting horrors of slavery, the cruelty that goes beyond the rape and violence to the idea that it is acceptable to own another human being and treat them as property, not people? And how do you do that without the exploitation of suffering? For Whitehead, the answer was to vividly recreate the brutal realities of slavery but to blend them with unique elements — a literal railroad and the surreal South Carolina White community that seems too welcoming — and to build the story around Cora. A symbol for modern Black society, Cora always feels fully fleshed out as a person even as she embodies the essence of persistence and resilience.
Somehow, Whitehead followed his novel about slavery with one that is even more heartbreaking as it reveals the hard, sad truths about the relentlessness of American racism and the everlasting damage it causes on individuals and society. Whitehead grimly builds his story out from a real-life investigation into a Jim Crow-era reform school in Florida where authorities had beaten, tortured, raped and even murdered the boys there. But Whitehead doesn’t simply re-create the ultimate symbol of institutional racism — there were Black and White boys held there, separately, of course, but the mistreatment was wildly uneven — he tells the story of two kids stuck there in the 1960s, so we are forced to feel the impact of the horrors there, seeing the harm it does to their young souls. And Whitehead also follows one of the two boys ahead in life to illuminate the scars this experience has seared into him.
In his two previous novels, Whitehead’s characters were trapped in the White world, facing not only the daily indignities of societal hatred but the always-present specter of violence and death. For salesman Ray Carney and his family, in the Harlem of the 1950s and 1960s, there is a touch of splendid isolation for Black families. The good they can do, the trouble they can get into, the wealth they can acquire or fritter away, the moral stands they must take or turn away from — it largely begins and ends in the Black community. Borrowing from the heist novel genre to drive his plot, Whitehead brilliantly re-creates this time and place without ever losing sight of how the White world beyond its borders still has the wealth and the power and still hinders and harms Carney and company.