The Plot Widens

Colson Whitehead, Writing Himself Everywhere but Into a Corner

Colson Whitehead's latest novel, "Apex Hides the Hurt," began with the notion of a corporate "nomenclature consultant" being brought in to rename a town. (By Susan Biddle -- The Washington Post)

Next time around, Colson Whitehead says, he may try that thing young novelists usually do -- write something that comes out of his own life.

The 36-year-old author of "The Intuitionist," "John Henry Days" and, most recently, "Apex Hides the Hurt" is explaining his creative method during a recent Washington visit. The pattern so far, he says, has been to start not from life but from an abstract idea: "Then I have to think up a story and characters and situations."

Take "The Intuitionist," the metaphysically intricate whodunit about (of all things) elevator inspectors that had critics comparing Whitehead to writers as varied as Dashiell Hammett, Ralph Ellison and Thomas Pynchon when he published it in 1999.

That first book originated, he says, when he found himself imagining what would happen if someone with the seemingly mundane job of making sure elevators stay safe had to investigate a serious crime. To write it, he found himself inventing a whole elevator-inspection subculture. It includes a corrupt hierarchy of racist, sexist good old boys and is riven by infighting between two lovingly imagined philosophical camps: the Empiricists, who inspect elevators by the scientific book, and the Intuitionists, who can just feel it when an elevator's overspeed governor, say, is on the fritz.

Or take the new book he published this spring.

"Apex Hides the Hurt" began with Whitehead contemplating the notion of a corporate "nomenclature consultant" being brought in to rename a town. At the same time he found himself meditating on the cultural significance of Band-Aids. These ideas got him started on a novel that -- while it feels radically different from "The Intuitionist" -- nonetheless shares its abstract origins.

The writer is tall and thin, with dreadlocks that somehow make him seem younger than the unsmiling, crop-haired guy who stared out from the back cover of his first novel. When he laughs, which is often, his voice cracks upward into a not-quite-giggle. There is an intensity to Whitehead, however, that's camouflaged by his easygoing manner and often satiric prose.

He likes to take on ambitious writing problems, solve them, then move on to different challenges.

The one he's set himself now is: Can he find a language that will make his real-life experience compelling for others? To be more specific, can he write about growing up in New York City in the 1980s without having it be just "Hey, one time I had this big adventure"?

Reality-based fiction: What a concept!

For a huge talent who's still maturing, it could be the most ambitious project yet.