The Plot Widens

He was unaccustomed to normal speech, having grown more acquainted with the dingy dramas of afternoon television, and their dispiriting cadences. The world of afternoon television astounded and delighted in the sheer breadth of its humiliations.

-- "Apex Hides the Hurt"

You could say Whitehead's reality began with New York, where he still lives, in Brooklyn's Fort Greene neighborhood. His father ran an executive search firm where his mother also worked. They lived in Manhattan; the apartment he remembers most fondly was at 101st and West End.

Or you could say his reality began with popular culture.

A "pretty nerdy" kid who didn't like sports, he recalls being "always in the house, watching TV or reading comic books." He wanted to write "Spider-Man." He read a lot of Stephen King. In that company, realism hardly looked like a cultural priority.

Meanwhile, the TV comics he favored, George Carlin and Richard Pryor, had their own way of dealing with the real world: "They're making jokes and then they sneak in something terrible when you weren't looking," Whitehead says. "And then you're like: Oh, am I supposed to laugh? What's going on?"

In college, he majored in English and caught up with contemporary fiction. Nathanael West and Pynchon were favorites, along with Ishmael Reed, who wasn't taught at Harvard, "but I'd go to the library and check him out." He had an idea he was a writer, but hadn't done much about it: "In college, I wrote maybe three short stories."

What about?

"Teenage depression," he says, and laughs that upward-cracking laugh. He tried to get into a writing class. Got turned down.

A few months after graduating, he went to work at the literary supplement of the Village Voice, opening packages and answering phones. Someone told Jeff Salamon, then the Voice's television editor, that this kid named Colson was interested in TV. Salamon asked if he wanted to try a review.