New Eclecticism: An Interview with Colson Whitehead

Colson Whitehead has published three innovative and widely-acclaimed novels, The Intuitionist (1999), John Henry Days (2001), and Apex Hides the Hurt (2006), as well as a book of creative nonfiction, The Colossus of New York (2003). Born in Manhattan in 1969, he attended Trinity School and then majored in English at Harvard College. After graduating in 1991, Whitehead worked as a popular culture critic and television columnist for The Village Voice. Somewhat reminiscent of J. Sutter, the freelance writer and protagonist of John Henry Days, Whitehead has produced work as varied as music reviews, advertising blurbs for a dot.com company, a feature on weatherman Al Roker, an eyewitness account of 9/11, [generally written 9/11 and is written as 9/11 on p. 12 of this piece] and a satiric analysis of Barack Obama as a "Visible Man." In addition to his four books, Whitehead's writing has appeared in outlets such as The New York Times, Harper's, Salon, Granta, Vibe, New York Magazine, Spin, The Village Voice, and Newsday. While working at the The Village Voice, he met his wife, freelance writer and photographer Natasha Stovall. They currently live in Brooklyn with their three-year-old daughter, Madeline.

The simultaneous popular and critical acclaim that greeted the publication of The Intuitionist testifies to the conceptual freshness, narrative verve, and satiric edginess that have become Whitehead's fictional trademarks. By combining his knowledge of contemporary pop and media cultures with a background in various literary traditions, Whitehead brings a fresh, original sensibility to American letters. In part that sensibility is created by his examination of the ironies, limitations, and possibilities that arise under what John Henry Days calls "Life under Pop," a period when the proliferation of new media and new marketing forms have accelerated the global commoditization of culture. But that sensibility is also the result of Whitehead's reworking of literary traditions that range from folklore, the slave narrative, literary modernism, postmodernism, and black urban fiction, to detective noir, magical realism, image fiction, and post-soul literature. Perhaps the term "New Eclecticism" best encapsulates Whitehead's exhilarating culture-, genre, and media-crossing art.

Whitehead's evocation of new media formats, satiric juxtaposition of generic elements, and artistic play with previous intellectual and artistic traditions also invite comparison to the sampling and mixing techniques of the hip hop music that he has written about in his fiction and prose. His fiction has been incorporated into actual hip hop performances in New York City, while, at the same time, it has been "canonized" by its recent inclusion in the Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Whitehead's popular and critical

Photo of Colson Whitehead

successes prompt consideration of his relationship to contemporary culture critique, to American literature in general, and to African-American literature in particular.

The following conversation between Colson Whitehead and Linda Selzer took place in October and November, 2007.

SELZER: The innovative voice that you bring to American literature can be attributed in part to your familiarity with popular culture, from music and television to comic books and internet cultures. I find it refreshing that even as your novels have achieved rapid recognition as "serious" literature, you have been open about your attraction to popular culture forms. Can you tell us a little about the pop culture that you find most interesting or important to you as a writer?

WHITEHEAD: Anything I find interesting goes in the hopper and becomes an influence or inspiration to some degree. At various times, that's been comics, film, TV, music. And books—can't forget books! The things that made me want to write were things I read when I was little—X-Men and Spider-Man comics, then science fiction, horror and fantasy novels. Who wouldn't want to write Spider-man? It was a no-brainer. It wasn't until high school that I got exposed to Dostoyevsky and Dickens and started to think, oh, a novel doesn't have to have werewolves to be interesting. Quite the revelation. And not until...