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NEW YORK
- You expect novelist Colson Whitehead, a Pulitzer
finalist and MacArthur Foundation “genius,” to
suggest an august sanctum for an interview — say, the
Harvard Club in Midtown, to which the member of the
class of ‘91 could belong (but doesn’t).
Instead,
the dreadlocked, bookish New Yorker picks a
hole-in-the-wall Vietnamese restaurant on the Lower East
Side. It’s a hideaway haunt where he parked himself in
a back corner one recent Friday, wearing a dark blazer,
white oxford, blue jeans and red socks.
The
gritty locale fits his unassuming style and the milieu
of his latest book, “Zone One.” It is set in a
post-apocalyptic New York overrun by the brain-eating
undead. The book, his sixth, explores his lifelong
attraction to horror films.
“I’ve
been into zombie and horror flicks since childhood,”
he said between bites of lemongrass shrimp with noodles.
“After the turkey was carved at Thanksgiving and
Christmas, we would throw in horror movies and bond.”
Whitehead,
41, had a privileged childhood on Manhattan’s Upper
West Side, the third of four children of parents who
owned an executive recruiting firm. He attended private
school and summered in the Hamptons, burying himself in
comics and science fiction.
“Zone
One” also is an elegy for a city that he has known all
his life, one that has been disappearing as old
structures are torn down and new ones erected.
“I’m
a museum of old New York — I was made here,” said
Whitehead, who teaches at Princeton. “A lot of my
ideas about the world and how people move through it
were formed by just walking the streets and taking the
subway and hearing the sirens at night.”
The
Manhattan in “Zone One” is a ravaged wasteland. It
is the not-so-distant future and a plague has turned the
world’s people into zombies. It is up to the lead
character, the improbably named B-student Mark Spitz,
and his team of human survivors to clear out the legions
of zombies in Lower Manhattan without getting eaten —
a situation that Whitehead likens to surviving in New
York on any given day.
Spitz and
some of the stragglers — the kinder, gentler of the
two types of zombies in “Zone One” — are “all
emotionally connected to some aspect or place in their
past,” Whitehead said. “Hanging onto that in the
face of disaster is part of what I wanted to map.”
Tall, fit
and cerebral, Whitehead looks like a model (he has posed
for Vogue) or an athlete (not). He confesses that aside
from walking, he does not get much exercise.
“I have
a high metabolism,” he said with a smile.
Whitehead
writes in cinematic images, with a lucid command of
language, a knack for comic invention and a blithe
freedom. Surprisingly, it is an agonizing process for
him.
“I know
I’m not digging ditches, but writing is hard work,”
he said. “The humor, the joke that someone might read
and laugh at, is still work. It’s constructed and you
mull it over for months and months to get it just so.”
His lead
characters, like him, are far from run-of-the-mill.
There is the female elevator inspector in “The
Intuitionist,” his 1999 breakout. “Apex Hides the
Hurt” centered on a “nomenclature consultant.” And
an unstereotypical black teen growing up in the Hamptons
is at the heart of “Sag Harbor.”
His
writing might have been considered “postracial” —
a term he views as hopeful but misguided — before the
notion came into vogue. Race has been and remains very
important in America, but it is not all-defining, said
Whitehead. In the post-apocalypse, it’s a non-issue.
“Well,
it seems like if the world’s ending, you’re not sort
of worrying about mortgages, the Yankees winning, and
the race of the quivering human hiding out in the gas
station with you as thousands of hungry undead are
massed outside,” he said.
“Zone
One” has a wrecked landscape that evokes the aftermath
of the 9/11 attacks, with the remains of the dead
floating in the air as ash.
“That’s
in there, for sure,” he said. “But for me, it’s
not just that. There are all sorts of disasters and
catastrophes, public and personal, that happen to
people. I’m interested not so much in the specifics of
what happened, but the natural and unnatural responses
to it.”
The book
looks at how people deal with changed situations. If
someone is a sorority cheerleader, what can you do with
that in the apocalypse, Whitehead wondered.
“In the
face of ... a terrorist attack or a hurricane ... or
more personal disaster like death, divorce, losing your
job, losing a child, how do we bounce back?” he said.
“When the world has changed, what kind of rules do we
have to make up in order to keep going? Here, it’s a
zombie outbreak. But it’s about people trying to
endure and re-make connections, finding their way back
to their fallen world, if they can.”
It’s a
question that Whitehead, who is divorced, wrestles with
in other contexts. He and his ex-wife,
writer/photographer Natasha Stovall, have joint custody
of their 7-year-old daughter.
“She’s
a good kid,” he said of his grade-schooler. “Her
presence in my life has made me a better person and
improved my work and happiness.”
(EDITORS:
STORY CAN END HERE)
Google
Whitehead’s name with the word “brilliant,” an
adjective used in many reviews of his books, and you get
more than 60,000 hits. His 92,000 Twitter followers
watch for his daily quips. That he is such an
accomplished and celebrated writer might still come as a
surprise to some of his friends and professors at
Harvard, where he was once turned down for a
creative-writing class.
“My
submission was bad,” he said.
Whitehead
took classes in African-American studies and in other
departments outside his English major. After graduation,
he worked as an editorial assistant at the Voice
Literary Supplement. He rose to become TV critic at the
Village Voice from 1994 to 1996, a job that helped him
hone his already keen instincts for popular culture.
The Voice
experience fortified his vision of himself as a writer
who could tell interesting, engaging stories. After all,
it had marquee black writers — Lisa Jones, Greg Tate,
Nelson George — who were not limited to subjects
related to race.
“My
first regular writing gig told me that I could do
whatever I wanted, and it wasn’t weird,” he said.
While
still working at the Voice, Whitehead wrote a plotless
novel about a Gary Coleman-esque child star called
“The Return of the Spook.” Still unpublished, it was
a learning experience, a process that opened a path that
allowed other works to flow out of him. He crafted
“The Intuitionist” as an antithesis to that.
With each
book, Whitehead has proved to be a literary Houdini,
wriggling out of the confines of genre. “The
Intuitionist” is a taut detective novel that John
Updike, writing in the New Yorker, called
“scintillating.”
Whitehead
then dove into historical fiction with his next book,
the loosely structured “John Henry Days,” a Pulitzer
finalist. “Sag Harbor” is memoir-like in its
intimacy. “The Colossus of New York” collects his
essays about his favorite city.
“Zone
One” is another re-invention for someone who gives
something his all and then moves on.
“I had
finished ‘Sag Harbor,’ and by the time I started
working again, all my ideas seemed kind of old,”
Whitehead said. “The stuff I’d done before was no
longer interesting. I didn’t do anything for almost
two years. Then I had one of my zombie dreams.”
Whitehead
has been having those dreams since he was 12, when his
parents took him and his brother, both avid horror fans,
to see George Romero’s X-rated “Dawn of the Dead.”
The movie, a landmark of the genre, became a feature of
his subconscious.
“Some
people have anxiety dreams about talking to an assembly
and they’re naked or they forgot the big
presentation,” he said. “About once a month, I’ve
had zombie dreams for the last 30 years, where it’s
the underworld, I’m with people or not, they’re fast
or slow, they talk, they don’t, I escape or
don’t.”
The
particular dream that triggered “Zone One” happened
in summer 2009 when Whitehead had house guests.
“I woke
up and just wished they’d leave — I wanted to be
alone,” he said. “I sort of stayed in bed.”
Then he
had a visitation of zombies, which provided an answer to
what the subject of his next book would be.
“In the
dream, I thought to myself, ‘I wonder if they swept
all their zombies out,’” he said, adding that he
always has been curious about why zombies have such a
hold over the living. He had to find out.
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