In between sips of Coke, he’s recalling his process writingSag Harbor, his semiautobiographical 2009 novel.
“My earlier books were more detached, a little more clinical,” he says.
“This was a real breakthrough for me, in terms of letting it all hang out.”
Credit: Chris Close; Doubleday
So, was preparing for the book, his fifth, more difficult than others?
He laughs again, knowingly this time.
“I was really depressed those last six weeks I was writing it,” he admits.
He recently crossed the 20-year mark as a published author.
“I think I’m more in control,” he says of his current work.
questions and answering them through ironic narrators and an abundance of granular detail.
(He answers this surprisingly head-on.)
These tales critically examine the American narrative, but they’re more playful, less linked to concrete events.
He still grins just thinking about it.
“It’s absurd!
It lends an otherworldly quality to the story.”
(Moonlight’s Barry Jenkins is set to direct the TV adaptation for Amazon.)
impulse, a gonzo response to, “What if the Underground Railroad was real?”
and, accordingly, it nicely delineates his maturation.
“I couldn’t have [written it] 20 years ago,” Whitehead says.
YetThe Nickel Boysfurther showcases the author’s visceral historical imagination.
In a split second, your life can change."
Whitehead was working on a crime novel still is, in fact when he learned about Dozier in 2014.
“I did feel this compulsion,” he says.
“There have not been a lot of novels about teenagers growing up under Jim Crow.
There are stories that have not been told…that need to be told.”
“Getting the slang of the characters makes it vivid for me,” he says.
“There’s a worldview in slang like calling the White House ‘The Ice Cream Factory.’
There’s an attitude towards the world.
It’s rueful, kind of comic.
It helped me understand them.”
Whitehead has now been novelizing this country’s past for 20 years.
His narrators are less existential; his approach has turned tighter, sadder, sharper.
And he feels it.
As to why he keeps returning to American history’s dark heart?
Whitehead lets out one last loud, morbid laugh.
“There’s a lot of good material.”
