The Plot Widens

"He was just a young guy who came right out of the gate with a lot of sass and attitude," says Salamon, now an editor at the Austin American-Statesman. Whitehead did that first review, then another and another. One time Salamon asked him to write about TV weatherman Al Roker. Back came "a really insane, over-the-top" piece that ran under the headline "Al Roker: God of Thunder."

"I remember sitting there slack-jawed as I read it," Salamon says.

Whitehead ended up doing a TV column for a couple of years. "There's not a lot of good TV," he says, "so it became a humor column over time." He used it to try out different voices and to write about whatever caught his fancy. He also started a novel on the side. It was, he says, "a pop-cultural satire about a former child star, like Gary Coleman, on a sort of bad '80s sitcom" who grows up and turns into "this new sort of Shaft figure."

Lots of publishers turned it down.

His agent dumped him.

Whitehead just assigned himself another problem and kept writing.

That first attempt, he says, had lacked a strong narrative line, so "I figured I should probably learn about plot." He'd been reading detective fiction, which he thought could help him: "If you read 10 Elmore Leonard books in a row, you can really see the strings." He decided to do "a joke detective novel" -- and started writing "The Intuitionist."

At first he wrote it with a hip male protagonist, in "a voice I'd used at the Village Voice." He quickly realized it wouldn't do. In the same way he'd decided to think differently about plot, he auditioned a totally different kind of lead character. He made elevator inspector Lila Mae Watson "not like me. And so: female, no sense of humor."

It worked. Big time.

"I just started reading it and I was completely enthralled," says Tina Pohlman, then an editor at Anchor Books, who remembers being upset that she had to put the manuscript aside to go to a barbecue in Brooklyn. Pohlman had read and rejected Whitehead's first attempt ("The less said about it the better -- he was just warming up"). This one she bought, for what she calls "not one of those huge six-figure advances, but not a tiny one."

"Literary reputations may not always rise and fall as predictably as elevators," Gary Krist wrote in the New York Times when "The Intuitionist" came out, "but if there's any justice in the world of fiction, Colson Whitehead's should be heading toward the upper floors."

Whitehead wasn't waiting around to find out. He was already halfway through "John Henry Days."