Understanding Colson Whitehead

A Q&A with Derek C. Maus on one of my favorite authors.

One of the great pleasures of doing a newsletter for a few years is you can pick up some great readers. One of those readers, Derek C. Maus happens to be a bona fide expert in a topic of significant interest to me, the works of Colson Whitehead.

After some private exchanges about Whitehead’s work I thought it might be interesting to do a public dialogue as bonus content for The Biblioracle Recommends.

I think I was right. I had an interesting time, at least.

Since 2001, Derek C. Maus has taught literature at the State University of New York at Potsdam, where he currently holds the rank of SUNY Distinguished Professor of English. During that time, he has offered more than fifty different courses on various topics, primarily pertaining to contemporary literature. As a scholar, his primary focus has been satire in twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction, particularly that produced by African American authors, most prominently Percival Everett and Colson Whitheead. He has written, co-edited, or edited sixteen books, published twenty-five peer-reviewed essays in a variety of mediums, and given scholarly presentations in eight countries. Since 2013, he has divided his time equally between Potsdam and Montréal.

John Warner: One of the things I’m interested in exploring through our dialog is the different ways different readers read. I’ve been referred to as a “book critic” or “book reviewer,” but neither is quite accurate to how I conceive of myself. I’m just someone who reads books, albeit professionally, instead of recreationally. I have an educational background which has given me access to some approaches to reading and thinking about books that I might not otherwise have, but I am also not a “scholar.”

Your book is titled Understanding Colson Whitehead. It’s a “scholarly” book about Whitehead and his work. Help me, help us understand what a scholar is doing that’s different from (or the same as) a recreational reader. When you’re seeking to “understand” Colson Whitehead, what are you up to?

Derek C. Maus: Well, for starters I should specify that the book’s title was actually somewhat predetermined by the fact that it was part of the long-standing “Understanding Contemporary American Literature” (UCAL) series published by the University of South Carolina Press. My former dissertation director, Linda Wagner-Martin, is the editor for that series and when I told her I was interested in doing a book on Whitehead back in the early 2010s, she lobbied me hard to do it as part of that series. 

Although the UCAL series absolutely has a “scholarly” focus, as you mentioned, it is also explicitly understands that term not just to apply to those of us with a Ph.D in literary studies, but also to undergraduates, high school students, and those they broadly identify as “good nonacademic readers.”

For me, that’s a really great lane in which to swim when writing about someone like Whitehead, because I think one of his defining traits as an author is the manner in which he makes preliminary overtures in his books that are designed to draw in readers who might otherwise be scared off by “literary fiction” and then sort of slowly, but inexorably complicates the easy readerly satisfactions that might be presumed to follow from those overtures. To put it another way, he gives you the “Once upon a time…” that you’ll recognize in order to pull you in, but then starts to deny you the path to the “...and they lived happily ever after” that the formula would lead you expect is coming.

You can clearly see this process at work in The Underground Railroad, which starts out for its first sixty or so pages reading very much like a lot of other well-known stories about slavery. If the only stories of slavery you’d ever encountered before picking up that novel were Frederick Douglass’s Narrative, Alex Haley’s Roots (or the television miniseries thereof, for those of us of a certain age…), and/or Steve McQueen’s film adaptation of Twelve Years a Slave, then you weren’t going to be surprised very much by the opening chapters of Whitehead’s book either. 

In those first few pages, he runs through the grisly details of the lives of three successive generations of enslaved women – Ajarry, Mabel, and Cora. He starts with Ajarry’s abduction in West Africa and then moves through their respective experiences on the Randall plantation, culminating with Cora’s escape. It’s only when Cora and Caesar walk down the steps to board a literal underground train bound for South Carolina that the reader is forced to deal with something radically different. 

And if you look at the readers’ comments on Goodreads or Amazon that were posted when the novel first came out, you will see a lot of objections to what Whitehead had done (“This book claims to be a history of slavery, but there’s a subway in it!”). Most of these were pretty unsophisticated responses – and I don’t mean that as a denigrating term – to a writerly “bait-and-switch” that a lot of scholars would be more than happy to trace out in terms of its literary genealogy, its connection to various postmodernist theories, or in other contexts that are primarily of interest to those of us on the tweedier side of the classroom podium. 

Just to be clear, I don’t think that being conversant with those frameworks is required to “get” any one of Whitehead’s books or to understand who he is as a person (about which I have very little insight beyond what he’s chosen to put out into the world) or as an artist. What I *do* think is that they provide some useful conceptual “lenses” through which one can interpret his works…and they have the added benefit of being fairly translatable to a nonacademic audience without the need for oversimplification (I won’t say “dumbing down” because I can’t stand the elitist implications of that phrase). I certainly don’t have the magic key to unlock Whitehead’s meanings, but I at least feel like I know how to jimmy the handle enough to get a peek inside and tell others what I think I saw.

So my scholarly efforts to “understand Colson Whitehead” start from what should be a fairly universal recognition among his readers – academic and nonacademic – even if everyone doesn’t find as much pleasure in it as I do. That recognition boils down to this: he’s almost always teasing his reader at least a little bit, albeit in a manner that’s meant to stimulate, not to mock or to alienate. We don’t always like being teased, which is why I think a lot of people either get annoyed with how he alters genre conventions or simply ignore his literary “tricks.” I suppose you can’t ignore the depiction of a literal underground railroad, but it’s always been kind of shocking to me how many reviewers sidestepped or just plain missed Turner’s assumption of Elwood’s identity in Nickel Boys, despite how important it is to the plot of the book. I get not wanting to spoil the ending, but come on…

So the long and short of it is that I want my musings on how I came to understand Colson Whitehead not ultimately to be just another version of “The rosebush outside the prison in which Hester is incarcerated means exactly this…” kind of rigidly prescriptive interpretation that many readers got – and hated – in our earliest exposure to critical reading (that is, in high school). Instead, I was hoping to articulate a somewhat more formal version of something that pretty much any engaged reader can recognize having felt when they worked their way through the book, even if they didn’t (yet) have the tools to flesh out the implications of that recognition. 

JW: What was your first encounter with Colson Whitehead’s work, and what were your first thoughts about that encounter? I can start. I picked up The Intuitionist right after release based on a review I read somewhere, and my readerly sensibilities locked in right away. It seemed like a cross between Thomas Pynchon and Ralph Ellison, which to me at the time was chef’s kiss perfect. 

DCM: I was in graduate school at the University of North Carolina when Whitehead published The Intuitionist in 1999 and I was working part-time as a cataloguer in a second-hand bookstore to help pay the bills that my pathetic teaching stipend didn’t cover. One of my co-workers, a lovely fellow named Richard Wright who was as well-read as his famous namesake, had given me a copy of The Intuitionist to read a few months after it came out and kept raving about how good it was every time we worked together. Unfortunately, I was neck-deep in writing my dissertation at the time and didn’t have many opportunities to read anything that wasn’t directly related to Russian and American satire during the Cold War, so the novel went onto my shelf for a few years. 

It actually ended up being John Henry Days that I read first. I picked up a copy of it in a used bookstore in Burlington, Vermont at some point in late 2001 while trying to find something, ANYTHING to distract me as the country went insane in the aftermath of 9/11. The title initially caught my eye because I love Johnny Cash’s song “The Legend of John Henry’s Hammer”, but the description on the dust-jacket also really grabbed me, so I dropped a bit of the meager salary I had recently started to earn as an assistant professor at a rural public university on it and took it home. It very well could have suffered the same banishment to the “will read someday, maybe…if I ever can find the time” pile as The Intuitionist, but it was still close at hand when I found myself looking for something to read over Thanksgiving Break. 

I was absolutely blown away by the opening scene of J. Sutter chasing windblown receipts around the airport and ended up knocking the entire book out within twenty-four hours. Immediately thereafter, I just turned around and started it all over again, which is something I never do. Although it’s not accurate to say I’d never read anything like it before, it wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that I’d only ever responded as overwhelmingly positively to one other book, Pynchon’s V.  

There was something about what the book was asking me as the reader to do in reassembling all of the various bits and pieces of story that Whitehead drops into that novel – a trait it shares with V. even if the respective plots of the two books have almost nothing in common – that really struck a nerve. If I hadn’t had a stack of undergraduate papers to grade before the break was over, I probably would have read the novel a third time. When I went to reshelve John Henry Days, though, I rediscovered the copy of The Intuitionist that Richard had given me two years earlier and put it aside to read at the conclusion of the semester.

Knowing nothing at all about Whitehead at that point, I was disappointed to find out that he hadn’t yet published anything else, so I kind of put him into a “circle back to this” compartment in my mind as I spent the next couple of years acclimatizing myself simultaneously to my new position’s heavy teaching load and to the winters that last half the year in my new home twenty minutes from the Canadian border in extreme northern New York.

Within a few years, I actually started having enough spare time to give some thought to scholarly activities other than teaching Intro to Lit and attending interminable faculty meetings. As is alluded to in your mention of Pynchon and Ellison (each of whom I love and had previously written about), Whitehead fit with my broader interest in satire and I gave a pair of conference presentations about John Henry Days in the spring of 2006 that set the ball rolling towards what would eventually become Understanding Colson Whitehead.

Whitehead used to tease the names – but not the publication dates – of his forthcoming books on his Twitter account, which was agonizing to me. I’ve pre-ordered every book of his since Apex Hides the Hurt because I can’t bear to wait past the publication date to read what he’s written next. If Doubleday ever wanted to put me on their list to receive advance copies of his novels, I’d certainly be open to it.

JW: Even though you write as a professional scholar about Whitehead (and others), it sounds like you’re a fan first.

DCM: Despite the fact that one of the best papers I ever wrote as a student was about Wuthering Heights, which I absolutely loathe, I can’t at this point imagine writing about books and/or authors of which I’m not a fan. 

I like very much the idea that what I am doing in my work is more akin to gleefully handing a friend a cassette or a CD of a band whose music just blew me away than it is to pontificating before an audience of capped-and-gowned Oxbridge dons about why a particular writer’s work deserves to be enshrined in a canon. 

My public assessment of literature tends to be advocating rather than denigrating. That’s not to say I think everything that’s published is brilliant or insightful, but I don’t find many occasions as a scholar or teacher to convey such views. My work is also inherently aimed towards people interested in and open to learning from it rather than those inclined to dictate why a particular work, writer, style, genre, or group that constitutes more than half the human race (looking at you, Mr. Naipaul…) is or isn’t worth reading. It’s sometimes a cliché, but I want my scholarly work to participate in a conversation about my chosen subject-matter, not a lecture.

I obviously do believe that it’s worthwhile to consider the work of Whitehead (and all of the other writers and artists about whom I have written) from an intellectual standpoint, but I also just want to jump up and down saying “This stuff is fucking amazing, isn’t it?” like I did the first time I heard De La Soul’s Three Feet High and Rising or the Tindersticks’ first album. Such utterances have generally been frowned upon at the MLA, but I also haven’t gone to that conference in over a decade so maybe things have loosened up a little. 

JW: Where does this instantly impactful work come from? Here’s a guy, not yet 30-years-old who has delivered a clearly major book, (at least in my opinion). What can you help us understand about Whitehead’s origin story that resulted in the writer?

DCM: I mean, who doesn’t expect an esoteric novel about rival groups of elevator inspectors to be the revelation of a major literary talent, right? 

He’s told numerous interviewers that although he consumed genre fiction and movies voraciously as a teenager and then studied literature at Harvard as an undergraduate, he didn’t actually write much until after he moved back to New York in the early 1990s and started doing journalism for The Village Voice. The manuscript of his first novel – which he has repeatedly called “bad” but which I’d love to read anyway – was rejected by more than twenty-five publishers, but that’s hardly damning for any first-time author. The fact that he then turned around and produced something as profoundly weird and “writerly” as The Intuitionist speaks both to his diligence and his iconoclasm. There’s no part of me that can imagine him at any point thinking “yeah, *this* will be much more of what a mainstream publisher is looking for from a completely unknown author, particularly an African American one, in the late 1990s.”

But your first reaction to The Intuitionist was obviously similar to many of the others who got wind of it. Reviewers, academics, and those in what I think of as the “Terry Gross set” certainly loved it right out of the gate, but it was never going to be a mainstream “hit” like The Underground Railroad was. And I would imagine that much like a lot of people who loved American Fiction were left scratching their heads when they got themselves a copy of Percival Everett’s Erasure, I suspect a lot of people who picked up The Intuitionist after enjoying The Underground Railroad or The Nickel Boys with their book club set it down about halfway through and never came back. 

That’s not a flaw in the novel at all, but it points toward his evolution as a writer. He certainly hasn’t “sold out” to become the literary celebrity – even if he still gets called “Colton” or “Colin” Whitehead as often as by his actual name – that he is today. He definitely has, however, become even more skilled in manipulating the conventional expectations of both literary fiction (The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys) and genre fiction – coming of age stories (Sag Harbor), zombie stories (Zone One), crime fiction (Harlem Shuffle and Crook Manifesto) – in order to convince readers to stick with him as he complicates their understanding of American culture, American history, race, pop culture, etc. I don’t think he was ever opposed to the idea of finding a large audience for his fiction, but I’m not at all surprised when he mentions how he considered himself to be too weird to do so as he was starting out.

Everything he’s become as a writer in his amazingly successful recent works is there as a prototype in The Intuitionist as well. There’s a reason he got compared to Ellison and Pynchon right off the bat, and it’s not just because he read and loved both of them as an undergraduate. So did I, and let’s just say I don’t anticipate having a novel a hundredth as good as The Intuitionist issuing from my fingertips any time soon. As the first wave of scholarly articles about Whitehead gleefully noted, he’s cribbing film noir, hard-boiled detective fiction, and the racial uplift novel (among other things) at various points in The Intuitionist – “wearing genre drag” as he calls it in one interview – but he’s also doing so in order to end up at a place that is very much of his own devising. 

For a twentysomething author to have the wherewithal to do that just blows me away. For me, he’s among a very select class of writers including Lydia Millet, Percival Everett, Louise Erdrich, Cynthia Ozick, Richard Powers, and the criminally underappreciated André Alexis in terms of the ways he creatively inhabits and repurposes “comforting” (that is, so familiar that they don’t demand much in the way of critical thought to interpret) storytelling forms and conventions in order to prompt more rigorous reflection in his readers about how and why they know what they think they know. 

JW: So what are your intentions as to what we should come to understand about understanding Colson Whitehead in your book, Understanding Colson Whitehead?

DCM: In Understanding Colson Whitehead, I tried to fuse two potentially highfalutin (but actually pretty accessible) critical frameworks together in surveying Whitehead’s entire literary output. I used the postmodernist concept of “historiographic metafiction” that Linda Hutcheon first articulated in the late 1980s together with the notion of a “post-soul aesthetic” that started being observed at around the same time in the work of a rising generation of Black artists.

JW: Okay, we’re going to have to unpack that a bit. Let’s start with “historiographic metafiction.” What is it? What are some other examples? And why are we interested in it?

DCM: Without getting too pointy-headed about it, let me sum it up this way: History is an attempt, more or less, to describe and to analyze the significance of what happened in a particular time and place. Historiography, on the other hand, looks at how and why the particular version (or versions) of history that exist at any given time came to be available, accepted, contested, etc. 

So a historian might try to figure out whether or not there is any factual basis for the story about George Washington being unable to tell a lie and therefore confessing to chopping down his father’s cherry tree, whereas the historiographer would be more interested in considering what it is about that story that would make it desirable to be spread widely as a part of what people know (or think they know) about George Washington (I guess we used to think that honesty and humility were desirable virtues in a president or something…).

Another way to think about it is that history is about what we collectively remember, whereas historiography is about why we choose to remember or to forget particular things and, in a perhaps more cynical (or realistic) vein, who has the power to influence those acts of remembrance and forgetting. As I alluded to above, I started my career working on both Russian and American literature produced during the Cold War and that stuff is almost always historiographic to some extent because the era itself is so deeply invested in telling good-against-evil/us-against-them stories that are intended to justify absurd expenditures of money on nuclear weapons, to say nothing of their potential use. So much of the literature I looked at in that scholarship asked historiographic questions designed to get readers thinking about whether those stories ultimately made sense and who ultimately benefited from.

Not surprisingly, a significant proportion of African American writers from Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass to Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison, Everett, Whitehead challenge the fundamental historical narratives that guide our presumptions about what it means to be an American or not. Think, for example, about the way in which the monstrous slavecatcher Ridgeway repeatedly pauses in The Underground Railroad to share his thoughts about the “American imperative” that serves to validate his work and Cora’s subjugation. 

Trump and his cronies are reducing those narratives of national belonging to some version of “people just like us and no one else” in their supposed efforts to make America great again, and I suspect that part of the eventual backlash against that will be another explosion of historiographic artwork that accentuates the willful ignorance, cruel exclusion, and logical incoherence of the ostensibly historical narrative that they proffer in justifying themselves.

Adding meta- before fiction refers to works of fiction that use various techniques to keep reminding the reader in some way that what they are reading is – like works of history – a fabricated artifact rather than reality itself. For various reasons, metafiction wants to diminish the illusion of reality created by fiction. The “Great and Powerful Oz” is the fiction, whereas seeing the man behind the curtain (to whom we’re ordinarily supposed to pay no attention…) is the metafiction. Metafiction denies the reader the “temporary suspension of disbelief” that allows us, for example, to forget that we’re sitting in a room full of people looking at light flickering against a wall at 24 frames per second and therefore wholeheartedly believe for a couple of hours that we’re in the Nakatomi Plaza with John McClane and a bunch of East German ne’er-do-wells. 

Put the two together and you have what Hutcheon called historiographic metafiction. If I may quote myself (and her) briefly, here’s what I wrote about it in Understanding Colson Whitehead:

Hutcheon observes that works of historiographic metafiction break down the presumed distinction between an inherently objective, factual rendering (history) and a playful, “made-up” version (fiction); instead, both are explained as alternate ways to “re-write or to re-present the past.” She also contends that historiographic metafictions expose their own “constructed, imposed nature of . . . meaning” (112) to draw attention to how and why “history itself depends on conventions of narrative, language, and ideology [and not just raw, objective facts] in order to present an account of ‘what really happened’” Such an approach invites deeper scrutiny of the processes through which particular historical “truths” have become fundamental assumptions within a culture or society….[I]t reminds the reader that such guiding historical narratives are neither produced nor perpetuated by accident, but rather through selective processes that depend on factors such as political power, socioeconomic privilege, and relative access to education, among others.

As for exemplars of the form, one that’s probably familiar to a lot of readers is Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, which (among other things) retells the story of the firebombing of Dresden in a way that undermines any sense of triumphalism. Far less-frequently read is Robert Coover’s The Public Burning, which may be my all-time favorite work of the form, though Percival Everett’s James is rapidly moving up that list for me as well. I think Whitehead’s work almost always reflects a skepticism about received historical truths while, as I mentioned before, also constantly reminding the reader of the difference between the story they’re expecting to get and the one they’re getting.

And without trying to be glib, we’re interested in it because Santayana was only partially right. It’s not just that those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it, but also that those who cannot remember why they remember the past the way they do are far less likely to ever consider any other explanation of why the present is the way it is. Knowing the origin and development about the stories that guide who and what we think we are is, to my way of thinking, pretty important to avoiding the kinds of mistakes that we are, as a nation and as a culture, blundering into with reckless abandon as of early 2025.

JW: Now, same questions for “post-soul aesthetic.”

DCM: This concept originated in the late 1980s and early 1990s and is meant to refer to art produced by a generation of African Americans whose artistic sensibilities were formed without the same allegiances to racial solidarity – i.e., “soul” – that were prominent in earlier decades. It’s far from a universally accepted term and, as is so often the case, it’s used more by critics to describe artists than by the artists themselves.

Again, allow me to quote myself quoting others:

In Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2002), Mark Anthony Neal argues that there is a significant generational difference in worldview between African Americans who came of age before and during the massive cultural upheaval in American society of the 1960s and those who succeeded them. Neal claims that African Americans “born after the early successes of the traditional civil rights movement are in fact divorced from the nostalgia associated with those successes and thus positioned to critically engage the movement’s legacy from a state of objectivity that the traditional civil rights leadership is both unwilling and incapable of doing.” This legacy (and the concurrent nostalgia for it) has often been culturally linked with the word “soul” in a manner that supposedly encapsulates the entirety of Black experience, not just in terms of social and political movements but also in terms of artistic representations of those movements’ values.

Thus, being part of this generation and expressing a “post-soul” mindset means not feeling any sense of responsibility or burden to represent Blackness in particular ways. This is hardly new to recent decades, mind you…Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston were both making similar arguments a hundred years ago in pushing back against what they felt were stifling orthodoxies being put forth by the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance. 

That said, there’s also little doubt that Black identity has come to encompass a lot of aspects (such as the nerdiness of Benji and his friends in Sag Harbor) in recent decades that were previously marginalized or excluded by respectability politics and/or the unity of Black cultural nationalism and you can see it not only in Whitehead’s fiction, but also in Donald Glover’s Atlanta (and his musical performances as Childish Gambino), in Issa Rae’s Insecure, in Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You, in Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Nope, in Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, in MF Doom’s Madvillainy, and in fiction by any number of (relatively) young African American writers like Brit Bennett, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Kaitlyn Greenidge, Mat Johnson, Kiley Reid, Maurice Carlos Ruffin, Nafissa Thompson-Spires and so many more.

And why are we interested in it? Probably because it seems to describe a distinctive quality of a significant proportion of African American art during a time period in which there both seems to be a lot more of it out there to pay attention to and a lot more attention being paid to it. I don’t think the actual terminology is of much interest or use to anyone beyond a relatively small group of critics and scholars, but the broader marketplace seems to be quite interested in what the post-soul generation of Black artists is putting out there in the world, certainly more interested than it was in what Amiri Baraka and the Black Arts Movement was pitching to them in the 1960s and 1970s. 

JW: Previously I had a newsletter where I ranked my favorite Percival Everett novels (that I’ve read). I’d love for us to do the same for Whitehead. I’m not quite a completist, but I’m close. I’m going to make you, as the expert, go first.

DCM: I’ll preface this by noting a phenomenon that has pervaded my reading of Whitehead’s work since picking up Apex Hides the Hurt. I am *always* disappointed by my first reading of his books. 

Always. 

Never fails.

I absolutely loathed Harlem Shuffle when I first read it. And I remember saying out loud, “Why did he write this? This is what Ernest Gaines is for” after reading The Nickel Boys for the first time. I remember silently setting The Underground Railroad down after completing it and worrying that the Oprah-driven hype surrounding that book’s release had been completely unjustified. 

Once I have read them again, though, I start to see each book’s architecture in more intricate detail and, in every case, it has only improved my estimation thereof. Each subsequent reading of Whitehead’s books makes the preconceptions I bring to them – or perhaps more accurately, my preconceptions about the preconceptions of others that I think he’s going to be toying with – fade away, thereby opening me up to different and more profound forms of appreciation of what he’s doing.

I think this phenomenon is partly what led me to my sense that Whitehead’s abiding technique as a writer is to misdirect his reader constructively. What I feel like happens to me is that I get so far into my own head in looking for the misdirection that I’m expecting that I totally fail to appreciate the misdirection(s) that he’s actually giving me instead. It’s a clear warning to people like me not to get too confident that our advanced degrees provide an unmistakable “royal road” (as André Alexis puts it) into a literary work’s meaning. I’m no less susceptible to the bait-and-switch than those readers who got mad when Cora found a subterranean train tunnel in mid-nineteenth-century Georgia.

So with that out of the way, here’s my ranking.

1. John Henry Days – I think my gushing about it above pretty much explains its placement here.

2. Apex Hides the Hurt – I’m very much running against the grain of consensus in ranking this as high as I do, but I think there’s so much more going on in this book than most reviewers and critics have noted. Expectations ruined the initial responses to this novel and kept most readers – at least those who have commented publicly – from recognizing how damn good it actually is.

3. The Intuitionist – I know it looks in some ways like I’m suggesting that he peaked early in putting his first three novels in the gold, silver, and bronze slots, but I also am factoring in the sense of sheer delight at my own “discovery” of Whitehead in those early years of his career.

4. The Underground Railroad – There’s a part of me that wants to put it lower, just because it possibly *should* have been the novel in which he sold out, but it really isn’t. The brilliance that Barry Jenkins extracted from it for his television miniseries makes that fact abundantly clear.

5. Sag Harbor – I’m almost the same age as both Whitehead and the protagonist of this novel, Benji Cooper. As a result, a lot of this novel’s generational jokes about New Coke, Afrika Bambaataa’s sampling of Kraftwerk, The Cosby Show, and Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam – land really effectively with me. I suspect that if you’re twenty years younger, this book isn’t nearly as amusing, though it doesn’t deserve to be written off as quasi-autobiographical coming of age fluff (as it frequently has been) either.

6. Crook Manifesto – Again, part of where I rank this book is probably due to my age. I am just barely old enough to remember bits and pieces of the cultural context of the three sections of this book first-hand (unlike the ones from Harlem Shuffle), so it really rings some pop-cultural bells in me.

7. The Nickel Boys – I like it so much better now than when I doubted it after my first reading, but it’s still not all that representative of what grabbed me in Whitehead’s work originally. It is, however, an unmistakable sign of his development as an artist and absolutely a powerful use of his public voice to shine some light on the real-life awfulness of one small corner of Jim Crow America.

8. Zone One – I’m not the biggest zombie-fiction/-film fan, so the genre aspect of this doesn’t really grab me as much as it obviously inspires Whitehead himself. However, the satire of mindless consumerism (and John Ashcroft’s “Let the Eagle Soar”) that lurks within this book tickles me to no end.

9. Harlem Shuffle – Crime fiction isn’t ultimately my thing either, so the “hook” here grabs me a little less readily than in some of his other impersonations of genre-fiction. Whitehead by all accounts does it very well in its own right, but once I put it together with Crook Manifesto and started to see how the larger structure – the snapshots of Harlem/NYC at various moments in time – allowed him not only to do crime fiction but also commentary on the history and culture of those times, I liked the book a lot more. Something has to be ninth on this list, so I guess this is going to be it, but that’s not a sign of dislike on my part.

Since you specified “novels” in your prompt, I didn’t list Whitehead’s two nonfiction books, but they would still slot in at the very bottom in any case. I’ve got more time for The Colossus of New York than I do for The Noble Hustle, though even the latter has its moments. 

JW: Here’s mine:

1. The Inutitionist: Similar to how I had Percival Everett’s Suder near the top of my rankings, I have an inherent fondness for the book that introduced me to a favorite.

2. Underground Railroad: This book grabbed me from the get-go and held on.

3. John Henry Days: Not far behind the others. I bet this could go higher if I re-read it.

4. Crook Manifesto: I dig crime/noir and I was surprised how faithful Whitehead was to the genre while also being himself.

5. Sag Harbor: I think this is maybe underrated because it’s a coming-of-age novel, which seems like a less-demanding genre, but it’s excellent.

6. Harlem Shuffle: I liked it, but it had diminishing returns after Crook Manifesto, which often isn’t the case with a crime series in general.

7. The Nickel Boys: Not a bad read by any stretch, but something has to be lower down.

8. Apex Hides the Hurt: I did not connect with this book and thought it a misstep, but your high esteem makes me want to try it again someday to see what else I can see.

NR: Zone One: Haven’t read it.

Lastly, the same question I ask all my author Q&A participants. What’s one book you recommend that you think people might not know about? It might be an interesting variant to ask, what’s one book you recommend to people who dig Colson Whitehead’s novels that you think people might not know about.

DCM: I’m going to go with André Alexis’s novel Fifteen Dogs, though I honestly think his novel Days by Moonlight is (thus far) his magnum opus. The problem with the latter is akin to recommending the show Letterkenny to viewers who aren’t familiar with either rural Ontario or deep pulls from the last thirty years of Canadian pop-culture. Fifteen Dogs is a somewhat more accessible book for non-Canadian readers and absolutely gives a good sense of why I say – above and on pretty much any occasion I can find – that Alexis is a gem of a writer hidden in plain sight to readers outside Canada (partly because his books aren’t widely distributed there yet). 

In short, Fifteen Dogs opens with a pair of Greek gods getting very drunk in a tavern in modern-day Toronto. They decide to make a bet about whether or not giving human consciousness to a group of dogs kenneled at a veterinarian’s office will actually result in them becoming happier or not. The rest of the novel rather brilliantly (and somewhat tragically) plays out the results of this bet. I won’t say anything else to avoid spoilers. 

Where is everyone else on the fiction of Colson Whitehead?

Previous recent author Q&A’s:

Humans Relate to Each Other And Understand Themselves in the Process with Adam Haslett.

The Name of This Band is R.E.M. with Peter Ames Carlin.

Echo Chambers of Our Own Devising with Charles Baxter.

Crime Novel? Women’s Fiction? Literary Thriller? with Kelsey Rae Dimberg.

Everybody Is Secretly Grieving with Alison Espach.

Observations Within Landscape with Ben Shattuck.

Teddy Wayne on Writing and “The Winner.”

Accomplishment vs. Achievement with Adam Gopnik