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A L S O+.T O D A Y

Excerpt
An excerpt from Colson Whitehead's "The Intuitionist"

Colson Whitehead's alternate New York
By Laura Miller
His brainy, gritty first novel about a black elevator inspector, "The Intuitionist," is a formidable literary debut

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Mosquito
Reviewed by Tom LeClair
A beer-drinking, African-American, female Tristram Shandy must carry this novel by the National Book Award nominee

T A B L E+T A L K

Great book. Awful cover. Weigh in on judging the book by its content, but the publisher by its cover, in the Books area of Table Talk

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INTERVIEW ARCHIVE

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THE SALON INTERVIEW: COLSON WHITEHEAD | PAGE 1, 2
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And where did the idea of Empiricism vs. Intuitionism come from?

I had a book called "The Evolution of Useful Things." I looked through the index, didn't see "Elevator." [Author Henry Petroski] did have a chapter on how inventors come to create improvements on various objects. Like, why does a fork have four tines instead of five? It was so over-the-top -- it was well-written, but impractical. He wrote, "Our objects are weak, they drink like fishes, they cuss like sailors, you have to keep control of them."

He was personifying them.

Yeah. And so, from that, it became this absurd doctrine of how we can treat elevators, how we can tend to them and nurse them.

I'm assuming that you always meant your main character to be black. Did you always mean her to be a woman, too?

No. I had the bare bones of the plot, and I was starting to get the voice of the book down, and it was just coming out the same, like my stock ironic black man character I've always used.

What are the characteristics of your stock ironic black character?

He's hard to describe, but I guess he can be kind of tedious at times.

Is he wisecracking?

Yeah, sort of wisecracking -- he knows what's going on. I guess the book would have been perfectly fine with him in it, but I was doing the same old thing, so I thought, "Let's just switch it up." Of course, that changed the entire book. I had to throw out a lot of the plot I had before, and it became a lot more ... it was harder but it became more interesting. I was struggling through the first chapter, and when she takes that bribe in the beginning, I was "OK, this is who she is."

The building super puts the money in her pocket, and she just ignores the fact that he's done it. She still gives him the citation, but she doesn't say, "No, take that back!" or "How dare you?" How did that form your sense of who she was?

She is incorruptible, but she has her own set of rules. She's not giving back the bribe, and she's not doing what she's supposed to do in that situation. She's in this middle ground. For me that fed into her responses later on, with the intrigues with the Empiricists and the Intuitionists.

Another unusual thing about your book is that often, when black writers are writing about race, they feel it needs to be very realistic. Do you feel you have more freedom than previous generations?

Yeah. Definitely, decades ago, there was the protest novel, and then there was "tell the untold story, find our unerased history." Then there's the militant novel of insurrection from the '60s. There were two rigid camps in the '60s: the Black Arts movement, denouncing James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison for being too white, and Ralph Ellison calling the Black Arts writers too militant and narrow, not universal enough. Now I think there are a lot more of us writing and a lot more different areas we're exploring. It's not as polemicized. I'm dealing with serious race issues, but I'm not handling them in a way that people expect.

You're using elements of a style that people associate with white men -- the Thomas Pynchons and Don DeLillos of this world. People who don't like that kind of book tend to dismiss them for being white men. By writing these big novels that make big statements about society they're supposedly showing a bogus sense of entitlement.

I love all those guys. And I certainly don't feel that way. I think they're great writers and I think they're attacking, grappling with, the culture in a way that interests me. I think if it's a good book, it's a good book.

You are in this literary territory that isn't usually associated with black writers, though.

I think Ishmael Reed has done it -- "Mumbo Jumbo" and "Flight to Canada" are in the same sort of vein, I think he's overlooked as a groundbreaking voice in black fiction. And Jean Toomer's "Cane," a '20s novel. He's a Harlem Renaissance guy. I think it's always been there, it's just that mainstream critics, maybe even readers, don't see the linkages.

They don't see that there's a tradition of the black intellectual novel?

Yeah. This guy Charles Wright, not the poet, had some very crazy books that came out in the '60s, and Clarence Majors, his book "All Night Visitors," which came out in the early '70s. You could say it's been ghettoized. No one's really picking up on experiments that were going on in the late '60s.

And what's your new book about?

It's about John Henry, the steel driving man. It takes place in 1996.

But how does John Henry, who died a long time ago, come into it then? I take it this is not the literal 1996 that we all lived through?

No.

It's the special Colson Whitehead version.

Right.
SALON | Jan. 12, 1999