Writer Colson Whitehead keeps breaking boundaries

Colson Whitehead unnerves me.

Every time I think I've found the thread that connects his seven books, from his stunning 1999 debut, The Intuitionist, about elevator examiners, to his best-selling zombie adventure story/existentialist dialectic, Zone One (2011), to 2014's The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky & Death, a reportorial account of the World Series of Poker, it slips through my fingers. Whitehead, 46, will speak about his diverse writings at Bryn Mawr College on Feb. 3.

"Who is Colson Whitehead?" asked Bryn Mawr creative-writing professor Daniel Torday. "He is one of the most important fiction writers working in America today."

Torday praised The Intuitionist, set in an alternate New York City during an alternate version of the civil rights movement. Whitehead brings into play central questions of racism, gender relations, and human rights in the context of the world of elevator inspectors. Satirical humor also enlivened 2006's Apex Hides the Hurt, an almost savage treatment of consumerism in America.

In between, Whitehead seemed to go all folktale with John Henry Days (2001). He began his career as a reporter and critic at the Village Voice and produced the 2009 book Sag Harbor, a semiautobiographical novel about childhood.

In a phone chat, Whitehead spoke about his work, including The Underground Railroad, a historical novel about slavery, due out in September.

The range of your styles, your stories, your essays is bewildering. What's the thread that connects them?

Nothing, I guess. Sag Harbor and Notable Hustle don't have much in common with each other at all. I guess some of the books are about race and history, and others are on pop culture and technology and the city.

Would you call yourself a comic writer, a satirist?

Some of my books are more humorous than others. If you want to compare it to my other books, [The Underground Railroad] has two jokes in it compared to the Noble Hustle, into which I tried to cram as many ridiculous jokes and weird asides as I could. The new one's quite grim.

You're digging back into American history in the new book. Will it have the same self-conscious mix of folktale and history as "John Henry Days"?

It concerns a young girl named Cora who grows up on a cotton plantation in Georgia and tries to escape north and has a hard time getting free to go.

I went back to firsthand accounts [for my research]. In the 1930s, the U.S. government paid writers and scholars to interview surviving slaves, people who were 8, 9, and 10 when slavery was abolished, and it's all been digitized and it's online.

But, of course, I also looked at the big slave narratives from Frederick Douglass and Harriet Ann Jacobs and various other histories of slavery.

No matter how fantastical, your novels tend to pose challenging questions about our lives today, principal among them questions of consumerism and racism.

I think slavery is one way to explore our nation's relationship with race - and elevators in The Intuitionist was just another way.

One way to talk about the world is satire. A historical novel just provides another way of exploring and discussing how I feel about things.

When it comes to race, we have come a little ways as a country, but we have a long way to go. Look at the last year and a half, the discussion about race and violence in America. Look at Donald Trump's election rhetoric.

What's your take on the debate going on today about racism and the Academy Awards?

I think the problem isn't with the people who nominate actors. The problem is that Hollywood doesn't make films with black characters. The problem starts with the producers and the studios that don't make films that have black casts, black writers, and black directors.

So there is a theme, an idea, a thesis that does unite your books, after all?

I guess the various aspects of race that I discuss in John Henry Days and The Intuitionist, and even Apex Hides the Hurt, they all are addressing the same central problem that we have, an essential American characteristic that doesn't change. We are racist, petty, corrupt - but also idealistic and dreaming and striving.

tirdad@phillynews.com215-854-2736

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Colson Whitehead

7:30 p.m. Feb. 3 at Goodhart Hall,

Bryn Mawr College, 150 N. Merion Ave., Bryn Mawr.

Admission: Free. Information: 610-526-5210 or www.brynmawr.edu.

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