A year ago, when Oprah Winfrey started singing the praises of “The Underground Railroad,” you could have said that author Colson Whitehead was having a big moment. Then he won the Pulitzer Prize for the novel. And the National Book Award. And made the long list for the Man Booker Prize.
A year has passed since his novel about a woman named Cora’s escape from a cotton plantation on a magically real subterranean rail line appeared on shelves, and the prizes and accolades are still causing a strange feeling for Whitehead — happiness.
“They all just lift my general depressive mood into one that perhaps resembles other people’s,” Whitehead said. “Basically itap all come together in this really great constellation of great news. Usually I wake up at 4 a.m. worried and terrified, and instead I’m waking up saying, itap a brand new day.”
What did he wake up worried about before all of this success eased his mind? “The usual anxieties of existence, whether itap the mortgage, ‘is that student OK; he was acting weird yesterday,’ ‘are the kids OK?’ ”
Whitehead, 47, got his start as a writer at the Village Voice, and his books have made him a darling of the critics since his first novel, “The Intuitionist,” a story about the improbable nuance big-city elevator inspectors employ in their craft, earned praise in a prescient review from The New York Times. “Literary reputations may not always rise and fall as predictably as elevators, but if there’s any justice in the world of fiction, Colson Whitehead’s should be heading toward the upper floors,” critic .
His eighth book is sober yet luminous, dark yet hopeful. In “The Underground Railroad,” Cora flees with the aid of a real, covert rail line that hides beneath the towns and fields of the 19th-century South. All the while, a ruthless slave-catcher named Ridgeway — a pitch-perfect arch-villain — traverses south, north, west and back again searching for Cora, driven by the nagging knowledge that her mother was the only one who ever got away. The flight and chase work into a pace that makes the book an impossible to put down literary thriller.
Whitehead recently wrapped up a European book tour and returned home only to continue touring the U.S. at a blistering pace. He’ll be in Denver Monday night to talk about “The Underground Railroad” and writing at The Denver Postap , which is sold out. Ahead of his visit, Whitehead talked to The Post about doing terrible things to his characters, advice he offers to young writers and what made him finally decide to write the book that had been on his mind for 17 years.
Q: You had the idea for “The Underground Railroad” years ago, but you weren’t ready to write it yet. What made you decide you were finally ready?
A: In terms of the structure and having to do such a thorough investigation of slavery, I didn’t feel ready when I was 30, and as the years passed I felt I would be a good enough writer to pull it off in terms of story, and more mature.
I’d been avoiding it for so long, and not to get too self-helpy, but (I thought) I should write the book thatap hard.
Q: I don’t think itap a spoiler to say terrible things happen to people — at the hands of other people — in this book. How did you handle writing about such visceral brutality?
A: The challenge was doing the research and realizing that what I’d have to put Cora and the rest of the characters through. I hadn’t done (a book on) something like slavery before, so I hadn’t done something terrible to my characters. … Before I started writing it and gearing up — that was the hard part.
Q: As Cora moves from state to state in the book, she is escaping one horrible situation only to find a new one thatap somehow worse. Does that journey mirror how racism plays out today?
A: If you end up writing about race and racism in 1850, you end up writing about race and racism now. (The chapter on) South Carolina has an examination of government intervention … but there’s also the darker side of government control in terms of eugenics and medical experiments. The white supremacist chapter, North Carolina, takes a lot of the racial terror of the Jim Crow period to its logical conclusion, which overlaps with Naziism and finds a final solution for a group that you demonize. So itap about race now, (but) I think itap about the demonization of the other, so itap not just race, itap about anti-semitism, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant rhetoric.
Q: “The Underground Railroad” is going to be a television series — directed by Barry Jenkins, the director of “Moonlight,” no less.
A: My agent sent it out to film producers when the book came out … (Jenkins) was early with good ideas, and that was before “Moonlight” had even gone to festivals. I think the contracts finally came through when he finally won the Oscar.
Q: you said you tried to watch “12 Years a Slave” but couldn’t get through it because it was so hard to watch, even though you were writing about the horrors inflicted upon slaves at the same time. Are you going to be able to watch the series based on your novel?
A: I know these characters, and everything that happens happens in a way that makes sense to me. I imagine I’ll be able to muster up the courage.
Q: You’re coming to Pen and Podium to talk about both your book and about writing. What do you tell young writers when they ask you for advice?
A: I got out of college in ‘91. There’s a big recession. And it seemed like there weren’t a lot of jobs for young people. I guess, find your place in the marketplace. When I started out, you could work in newspapers, and obviously newspapers have shrunk, and there aren’t as many jobs for young people. … There are opportunities to write for free, which is a shame. But the media environment is always changing … the appetite for media, for news, doesn’t ever go down — itap just outlets popping up and replacing each other. I kind of lament that there isn’t a place like the Village Voice where you can start out and just get better and better.
Q: You were writing a book about the digital economy when you decided to write “The Underground Railroad.” Will you ever return to it?
A: There are parts of that book I should resurrect, but I’m probably not the best writer to write about that nowadays. There’s probably some bitter millennial who is better keyed in to write about that nowadays.
