The Plot Widens

New writing problem, different approach: This second book is less tightly plotted and more expansive than the first. Built around the legend of the heroic steel-driving man, it asks the abstract question: How do we update this industrial-age myth for the information age? It also boasts a protagonist -- junketeering Web journalist J. Sutter -- who has a bit more in common with his creator, at least on the wisecracking surface, than Lila Mae Watson.

"John Henry Days," published in May 2001, established Whitehead as more than a one-novel wonder. He was halfway through his third, the book that would become "Apex Hides the Hurt," when -- on the morning of Sept. 11 -- the phone in his Brooklyn apartment rang earlier than it should have.

Whitehead and his wife made it outside, to a nearby park on a hill, just in time to see the second tower collapse.

Dressed, she's in front of the mirror. Armed. She puts her face on. In her case, not a matter of cosmetics, but will. How to make such a sad face hard?

-- "The Intuitionist"

Everyone in New York had their lives changed by 9/11, writers no less than anyone else. In Whitehead's case, he put aside his novel in order to write something -- but what, exactly? -- about the city.

He had done a couple of impressionistic essays already, about Central Park and the Port Authority Bus Terminal (which was really "about your expectations of a new place"). They weren't fiction, but they weren't reported fact, either. Much of the action took place inside people's heads.

"In my perfect world I would just call it writing," he says.

After the attack, the Times Magazine asked him for a piece. He used the opportunity to try to figure out "what's up with me and the city," and the result became the first essay in the collection eventually published as "The Colossus of New York."

Our streets are calendars containing who we were and who we will be next. . . . When the building falls, we topple, too.

He says it was "much more personal" than his writing usually is. But "it felt really good to do it."

In 2002, he won one of the so-called "genius awards" from the MacArthur Foundation. "It gave us this ability to say, 'Oh, maybe we should have a kid,' " he says gratefully. His daughter, Madeleine, is now a year and a half old.

A year later, when he went back to working on "Apex," he found that the world had changed but his "know-it-all, master of the universe" protagonist had not. "I can't relate to this guy," he thought -- and proceeded to rewrite him.

The original version of Whitehead's nameless "nomenclature consultant" had had a mysterious accident, "but it didn't really have any meaning, it was more like a comic sort of mishap." The revised version has a serious toe wound, festering under a flesh-colored bandage, that he refuses to look at -- and that simply will not heal.

What does this mean, this metaphor of unexamined hurt? Surely it would be reaching to suggest that the author, too, has been refusing to see himself whole -- that the real Colson Whitehead has been hiding beneath the Band-Aid of his fantastic fiction, which he's filled with characters who resemble him only superficially, if at all.

No. All we can know for sure, for now, is that real life has become another writing challenge -- another problem he's given himself to solve.