Novelist Colson Whitehead’s New York State of Mind

**Colson Whitehead** (0:00)
Is civilization to decline? Yes. Are we destroying ourselves? Yes.
Is the AI scourge making everybody dumber as we outsource very simple tasks to this digital agent? Yes.

**Sam Fragoso** (0:12)
You're setting those up and saying yes, like someone's asking you to order a side salad or fries.

**Colson Whitehead** (0:19)
Well, I think it's good. Things are so terrible out there.

**Sam Fragoso** (0:24)
Yes. Yeah, I know. I had the truffle fries. Yeah, that's fine. The end of civilization. Yes.
Welcome to the show.
Today, novelist Colson Whitehead. He's one of only a handful of writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction twice. First for The Underground Railroad in 2017, and again for The Nickel Boys in 2020 Yet Whitehead has made a career out of doing the unpredictable, hopping from one genre to the next. A mystery about elevator inspectors, post-apocalyptic sci-fi set around zombie stragglers, and autobiographical coming-of-age story set in Long Island. He's done it all, including in his latest book, Completing His Harlem Set Crime Chilogy with The Cool Machine. The final volume opens in 1981 New York City, where Ray Carney, a successful business owner and stolen goods fence, has just been named Sterling Furniture's Dealer of the Month. So today, we begin by going back to 125th and Morningside, tracking how Carney's descent coincides with New York remaking itself as a city, where money, crime, art, ambition, and corruption have all become increasingly inextricably linked. We also dive into how Whitehead worked to find his voice as a young writer. The impact of the late Toni Morrison, the future of literature, the specter of AI, how he knows when a book is finished and why, after more than a dozen of them, writing still makes him feel just a little bit more whole. I have to say, there is something unabashedly Gen X about Whitehead. Dry and defiant, world weary, yet can't help but examine and make fun of, and then write about the world as he experiences it. So I hope you enjoy this conversation. It's one I've wanted to have on this show for a very, very long time and I'll see you on the other side.
Colson Whitehead, welcome to the show.

**Colson Whitehead** (2:41)
How do you do?

**Sam Fragoso** (2:43)
How are you doing?

**Colson Whitehead** (2:45)
Not too shabby. You know, it's a publication day and so running around, but also that means that the people who pre-ordered the book are getting it in the mail. I'm doing the event tonight and it's pretty exciting.

**Sam Fragoso** (2:58)
You know, dating back to your debut novel, The Intuitionist, it seems like each new book plays as an antidote to the one before. But The Cool Machine is the final installment in your Harlem crime fiction trilogy. So I wanted to start here with Ray Carney, this furniture salesman with a loving wife who moonlights in the beginning as a fence, you know, a wall between the straight world and the crooked world.
How did you think about this book in relation to the others? Because I imagine it's not an antidote to Crooked Manifesto or Harlem Shuffle. How did you think about going back into it?

**Colson Whitehead** (3:43)
No, you know, it's a trilogy and I had a unifying idea for all three books. It's definitely an antidote to The Nickel Boys and Underground Railroad, both books that were very serious, a bit dark and had protagonists who were very much defined by their social circumstances, by class and by race. And so when I started Harlem Shuffle, I knew that I wanted a protagonist who can win sometimes. I wanted room for humor.
And so the trilogy as a whole is an antidote to what I was doing about 10 years ago.

**Sam Fragoso** (4:18)
And now that you've completed the trilogy, are you cured? Are you okay?

**Colson Whitehead** (4:26)
Never cured. But I'm working on something else now. It's a different tone, not the same capacity, not the same room for humor and jokes. And so I'm adjusting to the rules of this book as I adjust to each book as I start.

**Sam Fragoso** (4:42)
So you saw Ray Carney as an antidote to what Cora and The Underground Railroad went through or The Nickel Boys endured, which were the last two novels before the trilogy.

**Colson Whitehead** (4:53)
Yeah, I mean, a shift in tone and subject matter. You know, if I pull back over the last 25 years, I'll do a short book and then a long book, a book that's a bit more sober or has more jokes. And so once I'm done with a book, I'm definitely finished. I want to do something different and changing tone and changing subject matter works.