How Colson Whitehead Writes About Our ‘Big Wild Country’

“If he got a thrill out of transforming these ill-gotten goods into legit merchandise, a zap-charge in his blood like he’d plugged into a socket, he was in control of it and not the other way around,” writes Colson Whitehead in his new novel, “Harlem Shuffle.” “Dizzying and powerful as it was. Everyone had secret corners and alleys that no one else saw — what mattered were your major streets and boulevards, the stuff that showed up on other people’s maps of you.” Whitehead is the author of “The Underground Railroad,” which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and “The Nickel Boys,” which also won a Pulitzer, the first time two consecutive books by an author won. But he actually started “Harlem Shuffle” in between those two books. And now that he’s finished it, he can’t quite put it down. He’s working on a sequel, he told me. The first time he’s tried one. “Harlem Shuffle” is both a joyous and a troubled book. It’s built around Ray Carney, a furniture salesman and fence for stolen goods, and a series of capers around 1960s-era Harlem. But at its core it’s about patrimony, capitalism, ambition, race and the moral costs of striving in an unjust system. We talk about all that, and more: how Marvel Comics made Whitehead want to be a writer, how parenthood changed him, why he hopes to distill it all down to a haiku, whether the writing world is a just or unjust system, the nature of zombies, the nonfiction of the late-Aughts internet, the legacy of 9/11, his favorite heist movies, what his wife thinks his characters know that he doesn’t — and I could keep going. This one’s a fun one. Mentioned: "Wow, Fiction Works!" by Colson Whitehead Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead Zone One by Colson Whitehead Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead The Noble Hustle by Colson Whitehead Book recommendations: Love Goes to Buildings on Fire by Will Hermes The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka Mad As Hell by Dave Itzkoff You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld, audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Ezra Klein?

  Hello, I'm Ezra Klein. Welcome to the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:22Ezra Klein?

  I want to begin today by just reading a few sentences from Colson Whitehead's new book, Harlem Shuffle. I'm not going to spend a lot of time laying out the background of this. I just want you to enjoy the music and the propulsion of it.

• 0:39Ezra Klein?

  Pepper nonetheless allowed himself a reminiscence of his last visit to the Mill Building, or he tried to reminisce. Pepper had definitely dangled the mope out the window by his ankles, black wingtips and black socks held up by garters, and threatened to drop him on Madison Avenue, that the window had an eastern exposure, that much he was sure of. He recalled the man's name, Alvin Pitt, and that he was an osteopath by profession, but for the life of him, Pepper couldn't get a handle on why he was bracing the guy. He was at a loss. Perhaps when this job was over, he'd pay Alvin Pitt a visit. Ask the man himself what the fuss had been about. I just love that. Harlem Shuffle is one of those books where every few pages,

• 1:22Ezra Klein?

  I just have a note that says, "The writing!" It's a crime novel by Colson Whitehead, following the exploits and divided soul of Ray Carney, a furniture salesman and fence for stolen goods in 1960s era Harlem. It is a blast to read, but it's also a beautiful examination of patrimony, of capitalism, of ambition, of the moral costs and consequences of striving for a better life in an unjust world. Now, Whitehead, of course, is one of the most celebrated authors of the age. He's the author of The Underground Railroad and of The Nickel Boys, both of which won the Pulitzer Prize, making Whitehead the first writer ever to win the Pulitzer in fiction for two successive novels. He's the author

• 2:06Ezra Klein?

  of many other books, the holder of many other awards. And so, this podcast is just an opportunity to spend an hour in his company, listening to him skip stones across the water of his influences, his impulses, and his idiosyncrasies. As always, my email is [email protected]. Here's Colson Whitehead.

• 2:30Ezra Klein?

  Colson Whitehead, welcome to the show.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  How do you do?

• 2:33Ezra Klein?

  So I've heard you say that Stan Lee and Marvel Comics made you want to be a writer. What were the comics you were into?

• 2:40Speaker 01

  Late 70s, so Marv Wolfman writing Amazing Spider-Man, Chris Claremont's reboot of the X-Men was very big, Frank Miller doing his daredevil magic, getting into his weird scary New York that he liked to do. So yeah, I mean, it was Marvel Comics made me want to write. Rod Serling, I used to just hang around the house, reading comic books and watching TV. And so it seemed like being a writer could be a cool job. You could work from home and not talk to people. It seemed pretty ideal.

• 3:10Ezra Klein?

  What about the made you want to be a writer as opposed to say the artist or the inker or something?

• 3:17Speaker 01

  No, yeah, I mean, a lot of my friends who are my age, who now write novels, I think either want to write the X-Men or draw the X-Men or be the X-Men. So I think thinking up goofy crap all day seemed very appealing. I was also very much into Stephen King. You know, my mom would buy his latest book whenever it came out. I would make the rounds of my sister's rooms and then me and my brother's room. And so reading Night Shift and The Shining and Carrie when I was in sixth and seventh grade was quite special.

• 3:48Ezra Klein?

  Which X-Men do you identify with?

• 3:50Speaker 01

  I guess because I was kind of a nerd. I guess Cyclops, he's so boring.

• 3:55Ezra Klein?

  He's not even the nerd X-Men.

• 3:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, but it's like, you know, Straight Arrow.

• 4:00Ezra Klein?

  Yeah.

• 4:00Speaker 01

  You know, Wolverine's going crazy and Cyclops is always like, well, I don't think we should do this. You know, the humans might hate us. So.

• 4:07Ezra Klein?

  Although, do you follow it now? Because Cyclops became more of a revolutionary leader and has become a more unusual figure in the in the modern thing, like a soldier who kind of do anything.

• 4:16Speaker 01

  They've all gone through their, you know, the various permutations the last 40 years. So if something gets a lot of reviews and it comes in my radar, I might pick up a graphic novel. But yeah, it seems like they're up to some interesting stuff these days.

• 4:29Ezra Klein?

  You talked in another interview about how much you love this simple sentence from Raymond Carver, which is just, "He lifted the cup." What do you like about it?

• 4:37Speaker 01

  Uh, that was like actually a joke piece about

• 4:40Ezra Klein?

  Oh, really?

• 4:41Speaker 01

  About, about, about writing and people sort of over analyzing sentences and, uh, close reading. And, you know, he lifted the cup. It's just he lifted the cup. So, but I, I do like, I like Carver. I also like pensions, you know, five clause pileup sentences. I think you picked the right tool for the job and sometimes you want to be direct and terse. And sometimes you want to be expansive and complicated.

• 5:05Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, that was going to be the question. How, how do you know which tool to use for the job? How do you know when it's time to do the simple sentence? And how do you know when it's time to let loose with a pension-esque five clauseer?

• 5:15Speaker 01

  Um, before I start writing, I do a lot of outlining, you know, and I have to know the beginning and the end. The middle can be fuzzy, but I figure out, you know, the, the major plot points in the novel. What kind of narrative voice, uh, the structure, is it a long E or a short E? Those are two technical terms in the writing world, long E or short E.

• 5:35Ezra Klein?

  You get, get that in an MFA program, I assume.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  And, uh,

• 5:41Speaker 01

  uh, present tense, you know, um, all that kind of stuff I try to figure out beforehand. I'm not someone who can just wait around waiting for the muse to come. I'm in New York City. The muse is like caught on the seven train. There's a trash fire or something. So I have to have a plan every day and it's sometimes it's describe Ray Carney's office. Describe Pepper, another character. And so if I have an outline, I know what I'm doing each day. And if I plan the angle of attack in, in terms of voice and, and structure, I don't get 200 pages into a book and think, oh, this is really dumb idea. I should never have started.

• 6:15Ezra Klein?

  If I look at your outlines, but I actually see notes for what the structure of a plot point should be. It would say florid voice or comic energy or something like that.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  A lot of it's in my head, but I do break it down to like sort of one page sequences. And so it is, you know, describe Ray Carney, introduce the furniture store, a list of bullet points. And that helps me. Nowhere things should go. Obviously, if you're going to introduce the main character, it's probably not at the end of the book. Some things follow logically in terms of the chronology and you move them up and down. My little list, my weird little list. Here's a flashback to Carney's childhood. Where's the best moment to deploy that? Towards the end, toward the middle, towards the beginning. And so all these little three or four word descriptions are rising and falling in my outline.

• 7:04Ezra Klein?

  One of the stylistic things you do in Harlem Shuffle, which was one of my favorite parts of the book that I realized not the most important, was something I began to call side quests in my notes on the book, which are these little one paragraph short stories you would do, introducing a character passing through, like a Lothario who ends up in a stick up or a couch that nobody can figure out how it got into the basement. And they're just, they're like little fun, short stories. And I'm curious about those. Like you could see them as a distraction from the plot, but they really brought a little sense of joy to it for me. I'm interested in how they came about.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  I think, you know, they're fun to come up with and they come very naturally. I have to populate the hostages in the heist scene. Who are they? How can I compress a lifetime into a paragraph? So there's a challenge there. But mostly when I see paragraphs like that, I think, oh, I've been doing this for 22 years. And 20 years ago, that would have been a three-page digression. And now I know how to do it in a paragraph. So for me, I'm always really glad that I've learned some, you know, some discipline and I've learned how to boil things down into 10 lines as opposed to three and a half pages.

• 8:17Ezra Klein?

  That's making me feel kind of bad because I've gone from a writer who used to be able to do a short blog post to now I joke with my editor that I can't seem to get anything under 1,800 words.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  Well, you know, The Nickel Boys was like a 200 pager. Harlem Shuffle is cut up into three novellas, each about 110 pages. So I feel like I'm getting shorter and shorter. And I'm basically looking for a haiku or something. I'm trying to get to the haiku and then I'll keel over dead once I accomplish that.

• 8:44Ezra Klein?

  Having achieved the platonic form.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  You have goals. Yes, all about goals.

• 8:49Ezra Klein?

  You said that with your books, you've got some sort of question you want to solve and that solving the question is writing the book. So what's the question that you're trying to solve with Harlem Shuffle?

• 8:59Speaker 01

  I haven't figured it out, so I've been continuing. So now I'm working on a second book with Ray Carney as the main character, set in New York in the 70s. And hopefully, when I finish this story, I'll know what I was trying to get at. Part of it is about the divided self. You know, Ray Carney is, he comes from a family of crooks. His father was a petty thief and he does not want that for himself. He wants to be a good family man and an upstanding member of society. But there is that call of his blood, his sort of criminal nature. And that's part of the trajectory of the book. The more I get deeper into the second novel, I realize it's also about New York.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  I think it's there in the first book, but in trying to figure out New York in the 70s for Carney, those are my first memories of being a little kid, living in a very dirty, gritty New York City. So it's tracing the evolution of New York in the late 50s to the mid 60s, where we got the World's Fair and we're starting to get into New York's version of the civil rights movement to New York in the 70s, when crime's at an all time high. So I don't have the answer yet because I'm still working on Carney in a story, but it's about wrestling down different parts of our natures and also about our changing hometown.

• 10:22Ezra Klein?

  Let me hold on the divided self idea for a minute because what struck me reading the book was the idea that some of our self isn't ours at all. I mean, it's very focused on what we've inherited from our fathers. Carney with some of his father's, not just criminal nature, but the love or desire for payback. Freddie with his father Pedro's approach to women, I guess we'll say. And this is all in my mind. I have a young son who feels to me a lot like me. I'm about to have another in a couple of months. So I'm thinking a lot about what fathers pass on to their children. What got you interested in that question? What do you feel is passed on to you?

• 11:01Speaker 01

  Oh, that's a good question. And 20 years of therapy have helped.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  Pinpointed a little bit. Although, you know, my dad was a very difficult guy and troubled. He wasn't a criminal, but he's very depressive and angry. And, you know, over my lifetime, I've tried, when I've felt those things, wonder where, is it in me? Is it something I observed? A pattern of behavior? My parents had their own business and they worked at home. And so it seems sort of normal that if you had a job, you could work at home. And now, as I spend, you know, day after day in my apartment, you know, these last 25 years, am I doing it because I saw them do it? Or because I'm a writer and most suited to it? And so I'm still wrestling with how much of me is me and how much of me is them?

• 11:51Speaker 01

  I think the way it's expressed in this book is interesting because I didn't realize that when I started, but I'm describing my parents' 60s New York. You know, they were newlyweds in Harlem, a little bit younger than Carney, but starting a family and making a business. So I'm recreating where they used to live and some of the characters' aspirations overlap with theirs. But I'm also very, very proud of where I, you know, diverged from, you know, my father and what I saw growing up. So I guess I'm at that place, my midlife, where I appreciate what they gave me and I also appreciate where I've diverged and split.

• 12:35Ezra Klein?

  I just always wonder how much of our self we get credit for. And this seems like a question in some of the books. You talk about it elsewhere, that some of your books are about how do you create a coherent sense of self? And I wonder, like, looking at Carney, looking at some of what you've written, looking at myself, if we create stories about ourselves, but I do wonder if we create the self? And I'm curious where you come down on that and that difference.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  I guess, you know, I'm pro- Putting the work in to figure out yourself and where you fit into the world, where you fit into your family. From what you're, what you're just saying, I was thinking of Carney, but also one of the kids in the Nickel Boys. You know, he's spent some time in this terrible reform school and has been brutalized and witnessed other people being brutalized. And then he comes to New York. And in that book, I follow him in the seventies for, you know, a brief section and the eighties and the nineties. And each moment we find him, we, I'm charting his journey into selfhood. You know, he's been ruined. His comrades have been ruined and some of them figure out how to be loved, to love, love themselves. And then some of them don't.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  And I think all of us are on that trip, you know, in some way or another. And some of us figure it out sooner than others and some of us don't.

• 13:59Ezra Klein?

  There's an interesting way that this plays out to me in politics or a distinction in the way this plays out in politics, which is, I will say particularly conservatives, although this is maybe true for everyone, are very alert to the idea that our lineage shapes us, that who our grandparents were matters, who our great grandparents were matters, the faith traditions we grew up in matter. But then you, you move to politics and there's this idea that whatever the country was like 50 years ago, shouldn't matter at all today. Right? I call this the zero hour theory of politics. It's always the zero hour, you know, we're, we're starting right now. And it's always been a fascinating disconnect to me because I think we get in our own lives

• 14:42Ezra Klein?

  that we are shaped in, in both subtle and fundamental ways by currents that go back pretty deep into our, you know, familial history or even geographic history. But there's a real unwillingness to see that as being true of a country because it puts a burden of the past on the present that we often don't want to face and certainly don't want to pay. And as somebody who's both been writing about people shaped by their past and a country shaped by its past, you've been doing a lot of novels about historical America. I'm curious how you see that.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  I think in researching the Underground Railroad, so much of the connections I was making in that book about slavery and capitalism and white supremacy and imperialism, these are eternal forces. They shaped the country 300 years ago. They're shaping us now and to. Look away from that, you know, such a tragedy and leads us to all sorts of terrible mistakes that we keep repeating over and over again. So writing these historical novels and studying, say slavery and American history as a forty something, fifty something, as opposed to a kid

• 15:57Speaker 01

  watching Roots at, you know, eight years old or studying in college, just at the true scale of the tragedy of the dumb repetition of things really strikes me. And so this urge to look away seems particularly ruinous.

• 16:12Ezra Klein?

  Do you feel more or less shaped by your past and your country's past at fifty than you did at thirty?

• 16:19Speaker 01

  I think I understand myself more and American history more. You know, when I was thirty, I was sort of a Gen X douchebag, self-centered, not particularly evolved, and settling down and having kids has shaped me and I think improved me and made me more empathetic. And writing these books has forced me to think about where I'm coming from, if it's an autobiographical book, or where the country's coming from, if it's dealing with American history. So, yeah, I mean, I feel that I have put some distance in there between, you know, who I used to be.

• 17:00Ezra Klein?

  Because it's on my mind, how do you think parenthood changed you as a writer?

• 17:03Speaker 01

  Oh, well, I think if you, it's one thing if I eat ramen for dinner, but you know, I just say you want a more balanced meal for your children. So if you're thinking of someone else in this deep way that you're supposed to when you're a parent, it makes you a better person. And I think if you're a better person, it makes your work better, no matter what kind of work you do. But definitely it's made me more empathetic. And that can help get into the novels in terms of who the characters shape out to be on the pages, how I feel towards them. I think I'm writing Sag Harbor, which is an autobiographical book. I think when it came out, I said semi-autographical, but ten years later, who really cares?

• 17:47Speaker 01

  It was a big breakthrough for me because my first novels were very sort of postmodern, detached. And I realized after my daughter was born and various other things in my life that I had to be less removed and put myself in there more to grow as a person and become a better writer. I had reached a point where I had to do something different to make the next sort of step. So my life got better when my kids entered into it. And I think my work has gone better, too.

• 18:18Ezra Klein?

  Did watching little humans grow before you change your view of human nature at all?

• 18:24Speaker 01

  I don't know. I mean, it's it's even more mysterious as they get older and diverge from your idea of who they were and who they were when they were five, or grow in to themselves even more, strangely. You know, I have two children, and I know them quite well. And they're also totally mysterious. And that mystery deepens year by year.

• 19:04Ezra Klein?

  One of the themes of Harlem Shuffle all the way through is this tension between being a striver and a crook. And how would you describe the difference between the two?

• 19:15Speaker 01

  I think the strivers, you know, those who are clamoring into the middle class, upper middle class, want to work within a system. And a crook wants to manipulate the system for his or her own ends. But of course, that dichotomy doesn't really work because a lot of crooks want something better for themselves. And a lot of strivers are kind of crooked. So part of what happens in the book In those three sections, 1959, 61, 64, is that I start off with this very sort of street level view of crime in Harlem and then pull back. And in the second section, we get more about class and race and see how the strivers are just as corrupt as

• 19:58Speaker 01

  the crooks. And then pull back in the third section even more and see more of the forces, the money, the politics that really sort of shape the characters' lives in New York. But as much as I push these differences, I also collapse them. And I think Carney's a good example of someone who has all these different impulses inside of him. And maybe they're not very different impulses at all. There's different ways of trying to survive in the world.

• 20:25Ezra Klein?

  Well, one of the ideas in the book is that the people who have managed to elevate themselves out of looking like crooks are sometimes the most crooked. There's a very searing line where a character says, they're getting all mad at us for looting, but this whole country is looted. Like, ask them about where the land came from. And I wonder how you see that, if you just see that it gets worse as you become more respectable. It seems to me there's a very deep suspicion, I'll say it this way, of respectability and what it might cover up in the book.

• 21:01Speaker 01

  Sure. I mean, I think Carney's journey is one of understanding. He's not entering into a moral judgment about the corrupt banker, the corrupt real estate magnate. He's more really sort of understanding in a deeper way what he's always expected, is that the world is corrupt and you can't escape that in any sort of meaningful way, because it's all around us all the time. And, you know, in the second section, as I sort of pull back, he's being taken around by a corrupt cop who's pointing out neighborhood landmarks.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  And to Carney, you know, that's been a bakery. You know, he's passed, you know, every day for years. And that's a dry cleaning store. And the cop was like, oh yeah, there's a, you know, craps game in the back. There's a numbers racket in the back of the dry cleaning place. And that superficial exterior masks this, you know, hidden corruption. And Carney had no idea. So, um, I don't feel Carney's entering good judgment. And I don't think the narrator, you know, as a proxy for me is. But we understand over the course of the book, just how crooked everything is.

• 22:11Ezra Klein?

  The one major character in the book who seemed to me, at least in what we could see, to not be crooked at all. Right. Not be corrupt was Elizabeth, Carney's wife. And we really don't, don't hear from her in a deep way, but, but she struck me as really interesting. And her experience of this era, given what her job is, is really interesting. Can you, can you talk a bit about Elizabeth and, and talk about how you understand her in the book? Why we don't hear from her more?

• 22:37Speaker 01

  Sure. I mean, I focus on the criminals. And so the straight world doesn't necessarily get the page time it deserves. But Elizabeth comes from a bourgeois family, Strivers Row, which is a, a row of very dandy townhouses in, in Upper Harlem. And that's where there were the bankers and the doctors and the, and the teachers live. And so she comes from this very upper middle class lifestyle. Her in-laws looked down upon Carney for his job. He's a, a rug merchant is what, you know, his father-in-law describes him as. And his dad's a crook, obviously he's from the wrong side of the tracks. So I get to get into some of the, of the class tensions there. And her job is as a, a travel agent.

• 23:18Speaker 01

  By now, you know, we all know about Green Books, which were travel guides for black folks moving through the country during segregation. Where do you stay that's safe? What towns do you not want to be seen on the street? After nightfall, where can you stay? And so she's planning out trips for black travelers who are visiting their relatives, are going on business and planning safe routes through. I don't go outside of New York very often in the book or at all, actually. And it's a big, sort of wild country out there and she navigates safe travel for her clients. And that changes as we move through time in the book. And so it's people on vacations in 59.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  And then by 61, 64, she's helping out freedom riders, civil rights activists who are going to the South and getting involved. And so, you know, I want her to be a conduit to normal people. Carney and some of the criminals aren't necessarily keeping tabs on the rights movement. And she provides a sort of reality check on Carney's behavior. And then also on what real people are thinking outside of the criminal world that Carney belongs to.

• 24:32Ezra Klein?

  One thing that felt to me like an argument of the book is that we all have, to some degree, these divided selves. And so I really wondered how to take Elizabeth, if I should think that she was as coherent as she appeared. I mean, she does seem to have this very coherent sense of self. She has this very clear orientation to the moment in which she lives. She's the daughter of strivers, but sees her flaws really clearly. She manages to be both a capitalist, but actually working within that system to make people safer and to serve her community and to make change. Should I think there's something we don't see here that she maybe knows more about Carney than we see?

• 25:12Ezra Klein?

  Or is she just an example that some people are just navigating their worlds in a clean way?

• 25:19Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I'm doing more Carney stories and of course Elizabeth returns. And, you know, we see more of her later on. You know, my wife is convinced that she knows everything about Carney's criminal life and is sort of giving him a pass. And I'm not sure if that's true. I have to sort of figure out exactly what she knows and when she knows it and how she feels about it.

• 25:43Speaker 01

  You know, there's money coming in. Where's it coming from? How much does Elizabeth know? And how much is she willing to sort of overlook? Those are, those are questions that will be playing out.

• 25:52Ezra Klein?

  I'll just say, I really love that your wife and you disagree about how much the wife character in the novel knows, and your wife says, of course, she knows everything. And this, this effort at subterfuge is of course failing completely.

• 26:05Speaker 01

  Yes. Well, I think that's a reflection of various moments in our relationship.

• 26:11Speaker 01

  I have to confess, I had a cigarette. Yeah, I know. You smell terribly. So, yeah.

• 26:16Ezra Klein?

  Yeah. So, so maybe our, you have this, you have a lovely passage about our avenues and that our side streets, the, the ones that are visible to others and the ones that are not. But maybe sometimes we think our side streets are our side streets and, and they're not. I've, I've often found that about myself, that the things I think are hidden are a whole lot more visible than I had intended them to be.

• 26:34Speaker 01

  A little more well lit than we think, yeah.

• 26:35Ezra Klein?

  Yeah. One of the questions in the book is whether it is possible to succeed under capitalism. And I think particularly to come up under capitalism. I think something with Elizabeth is she starts at a high level and that gives her more choices. But Carney doesn't, and a lot of players in the book don't. And so they're making tougher choices. In your view, can you rise up through capitalism without compromising yourself morally pretty badly?

• 27:05Speaker 01

  Oh, I don't know. I mean, um, probably not. You know, 30 year old douchebag Gen X me says, definitely not. And when we're taping this, it's the 30th anniversary of the release of Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana. And I was thinking about the production on that record and the, the production on the second record and their struggles with fame, Kurt Cobain's struggles with making a bunch of money and rising. Through the capitalist system of the record biz. So I'm not sure. And definitely, I think in my early novels, I definitely have more of a critique.

• 27:46Speaker 01

  I think in Carney, he is quite plainly trying to ascend into the middle class, upper middle class. He wants a better apartment. He wants all the nice things for his family. And in his case, he is compromised because he's actually a criminal. So, um, and all the very successful people in the book, maybe not Elizabeth, but a lot of the heavies in the book who have risen into positions in society that most people would think are exalted are deeply corrupt. So I guess the book says no. And me, it's beyond my pay grade in many ways.

• 28:26Ezra Klein?

  Although on some level, I mean, you've had real experience with it. You started out as a Village Voice critic. You now have two Pulitzer's. One of your books is a Barry Jenkins series. You have a national book award. I mean, you've risen through a system. I'm always interested in people who've been very successful, who have very complicated relationships to what it takes to be successful. Has your rise made you more or less optimistic that doing this in an ethical way is possible?

• 28:51Speaker 01

  Um, I just try to make the books not suck. And that's my main goal. And not go easy on myself because I have had this, you know, string of fortune in the last five years where things have gone really well and people have accepted the books. I think I'm always humbled when I go back to work the next day after something nice happens and remember how just hard the job is. You know, it doesn't get easier just because it went well last time. I still have to figure out the sentence, figure out the paragraph, talk myself into thinking that the story is viable. You know, is Carney a good character? Interesting character? Am I pulling it off?

• 29:32Speaker 01

  So because I've been writing fiction for 20 something years and I've had moments when I've been up and then also when I've been down, all the good times seem pretty fleeting. And all it takes is a, you know, a read of a writer's biography, um, you know, a famous writer to see. The ups and downs and usually there's a big down after a big success. So all this good stuff that's happened the last couple of years, I realize it's not how it is all the time. It hasn't always been like that. And 10 years from now, things could be quite different. So I should, despite my depressive tendencies, savor these good times and perhaps they'll

• 30:17Speaker 01

  fortify me through the next bad patch.

• 30:20Ezra Klein?

  That feels very wise to me, but in a strange way, it feels very optimistic about the system. I mean, to boil it down a bit, you're saying if you make books that don't suck, great things could happen. And then you have to come in the next day and keep making stuff that doesn't suck. That sounds in a way very fair.

• 30:37Speaker 01

  Well, just because the book doesn't, the book is good and does not suck, doesn't mean people will come to it. Doesn't mean critics will like it. Doesn't mean readers will, will dig it. So, um, writing a good book is actually not enough.

• 30:52Ezra Klein?

  That's reasonable. What's your favorite book? Which is a book that to you had the biggest difference between how good you thought it was or the work of yours between how good you thought it was and how it was received? Like, what is your, what is your most unloved child?

• 31:06Speaker 01

  Well, it's two different questions. My, two different books, but the most unloved is Apex Sags the Hurt. And I think when it came out, people were like, oh, another racial allegory from racial allegory guy. But that's not my favorite one. You know, it's sort of too old for me to like too much. But, um, The Noble Hustle, which is, you know, a nonfiction account of the 2011 World Series of Poker was, I think, a just a breakthrough for me sort of personally in terms of confidence on the page. From reading Underground, you wouldn't expect that, you know, the tone of that book. It's really full of just weird jokes and there's so much of my personality in there. It's a nonfiction story and I grew up.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  Reading my mothers and sisters, creative nonfiction from the seventies like Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion and stuff like that. So it was my sort of turn at doing a longer nonfiction piece. And I just felt great about it. I felt I felt really in control in a new way, writing it. And even though there were the usual ups and downs in its creation, I was incredibly happy with how it turned out. And then, you know, very few people bought it. And in the end, it made me so angry that I sort of became, you know, recommitted to writing fiction and writing. I guess I'm going too fast on this, but I

• 32:30Speaker 01

  think I had to figure out why, why am I doing this? I was teaching a lot to pay the bills and teaching at places where a lot of famous writers in their seventies are sort of walking around. And I got really depressed, sort of seeing them having to come to the office, like, can we retire like normal folks at 65? You just like, write a book and then people like it or dislike it, then you write the next one, and people like it or dislike it, over and over again, until you have a heart attack. It just seemed really depressing. So I was going through a moment after The Noble Hustle came out. But out of that came Underground Railroad. So I was figuring some things out.

• 33:07Ezra Klein?

  So that's interesting. The Noble Hustle drove you away from nonfiction to a degree?

• 33:11Speaker 01

  Not away from nonfiction. If I, you know, I've only written two nonfiction books, but it provided like a five year break from writing fiction. And I think in that break, I came back more in shape. And part of that was the focus I got from The Noble Hustle.

• 33:27Ezra Klein?

  Oh, that's really interesting. So it's been a bit since I've read The Noble Hustle. I didn't, I didn't reread it for this, and I apologize for that. But that came out of a series you did for Grantland on the poker championships. And one of the things I've always, I liked about those episodes when I read them is, there was a real moment in which the internet had its own journalism style. And I feel like it didn't last long. But Grantland was a real place that happened. You saw some of it in Gawker. There was a kind of, just like new journalism was fostered in Esquire and GQ and some of these magazines in the mid-century, you had this moment of this really interesting, a little bit post-modern.

• 34:07Ezra Klein?

  Writerly nonfiction then emerged on some of the not that big digital first websites. And then it just seems to have gone away as a style. And I'm curious if you have reflections on it because I think you're somebody who did it really beautifully at that, at that point. And I've always been kind of sad that it didn't, it didn't keep going more. It somehow got overwhelmed by social media and new trends in internet writing.

• 34:30Speaker 01

  No, it was a cool time. And for me, I started off as a journalist and so that was my one big sort of return. And it was a once in a lifetime assignment. I got a call and they asked me if I wanted to cover the world series of poker. And I was like, no. And they're like, well, what if you sent, you know, paid your entrance fee and you played? And I was like, yes. And except I didn't know how to play casino poker. So I had to train and being forced to learn something new at that age, you know, was great because I just stayed in my house all day. So I had to learn, you know, train. And then, but I'm getting to the point, which is it was coming out in installments.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  And so I never, I've never written something where it's not finished and it's going out into the world. And then the feedback in the first installment from people who knew poker, people who know poker, like on Twitter was so positive that it really gave me this energy. And I felt like we were all in it together, me and the readers. And that really sort of fueled the, you know, the next three segments. So it was a great experience for me as a novelist who toils for two years and then people see it to have it come out in real time. And the, and the whole Grantland experiment was really special. I think it's led to a lot of not really edited pieces. I think people have now taken the license not to be edited that much.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  And I, and now maybe because I'm looking for concision and being compact in my own writing. I find the legacy of that is, you know, pieces that are a certain length because of the internet and they should be able to be much shorter. Also, I think Grantland really towards the end had like oral histories of everything. It's like oral history of. The second episode of Taxi, what they really got micro.

• 36:23Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, I remember that.

• 36:25Speaker 01

  Mean my new thing. And I think that it's okay that that died out. Now, I don't think we needed the chorus dissecting the evolution of Klinger on Mash.

• 36:35Ezra Klein?

  The great thing about writing on the internet is you can figure out new things that work. And the terrible thing about writing on the internet is then everybody can see the new thing that worked. And it is a real fast process of finding something cool and then driving it into the ground. And I say that as somebody who has run these sites and has been part of that process and has even discovered some things and watched them driven into the ground. I mean, it's, we actually know now too much. Like one, not that you're necessarily or the audience is interested in this, but one real change in my last 10 years is I was a very big proponent of journalists having access to direct analytics. I thought it was a really good thing. I always wanted to know more.

• 37:18Ezra Klein?

  And I've really changed my mind on it because I think it's good in the moment. And then over time, it becomes pretty toxic to the writing, to the story selection.

• 37:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, sometimes I've done interviews and then they're like, what do you think of this new Frank Ocean record? Just for the SEO, you know, I don't know Frank, I'm just, I'm an old geezer. I don't know Frank Ocean that much and I have nothing to say. I'm sure he's great, but um, just ask me a question so that it will rise higher on the rankings that we can search terms seems sad.

• 37:49Ezra Klein?

  Let me ask you about one other piece of that Grantland experience, which is you were describing something that is wonderful at its best of writing on the internet, which is this ongoing in the moment relationship with the audience. And I found this to be, I've always had that. I was a blogger and then I've always written for digital publications and I write a lot and I have a podcast. And so when I wrote a book, by far the hardest part of it was that it was years between when I started that thing and when anybody could see it. And it felt very hermetic. It felt also very scary, right? It was all going to come out at once and people were going to absorb it all at once. But it really changes the writing and it really changes the intellectual project. You really have to figure out your own mind.

• 38:31Ezra Klein?

  And so I'm curious how you think about that difference, given that it sounds like you enjoyed that. But now you're mostly doing things that don't give you that real time relationship.

• 38:40Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I'm a, I'm a, I'm not as active on Twitter as I used to be, but working from home and being sort of curmudgeonly and 10 years ago, trying to find a different way of doing things in my life, Twitter, interacting with strangers was, was actually really great for me, even though it was seen very contrary to my personality and just making weird jokes with comedians and writers and normal folks. And it was just, you know, just a real blast. In terms of my work, you know, I feel weird talking about the second book in Carney's story because I'm in the middle of it. It won't come out for another, you know, two or three years. But for me, it's very vital and exciting and I want, I want to share it with you guys, even though the first book hasn't even come out yet.

• 39:23Speaker 01

  You know, it's, it's a, uh, we're, you know, we're taping this a few days in advance of, um, publication. And so even talking about a sequel to a book that hasn't come out is weird. So I'm, I'm used to that time lag and then, you know, busting out and talking about things that aren't going to come out for a while is, is fun for me because I get, I'm excited about it and I want to share it with folks who are listening, even if it's, um, not particularly practical because it's not coming out for years. This is the first sequel you've done, right? It is. I've always, I've always been really sick of the book when I'm done with it, which is why I vary in terms of tone, like a lighter book and a more serious book

• 40:06Speaker 01

  or switch genres a lot. You know, I'm really done with the book when I'm gone to the last page. And in this, halfway through writing it, I knew that I had more stories for Carney. Um, I wanted to write about New York in the seventies and, you know, and this book started off as just a novel about a heist and I kept coming up with capers, you know, for, for Carney. So the three-part structure came in and each one has a different job that Carney's undertaking. So, um,

• 40:36Speaker 01

  I've never done a sequel and it's good to break your rule. So now I'm doing, following the person. I still have a lot to say about him and the world. And the voice is very compelling for me. So I'm just going ahead.

• 40:52Ezra Klein?

  One reason I'm surprised to hear you're doing a sequel on this one, although I'm very excited for it, is that, so when I was preparing for this, I read a bunch of press you ended up doing after Underground Railroad. And at that time, you kept telling people, well, first you'd have a bit where you told people you're working on a Star Wars novel or a romance in the Russian Revolution. But then you'd say, you're working on this book in Harlem, a Harlem crime book. And then you did Nickel Boys. And so it seems like it took this book some time to catch for you to become the thing that really obsessed you. But now that it's over, it's interesting to me that it's actually the one that is pulling you forward that you can't seem to leave.

• 41:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, when my schedule cleared after Underground, I had the idea for the Nickel Boys and I was taking notes for Harlem Shuffle. But it was spring of 2017 and Trump had just got elected and trying to work out my hopes and fears about America made Nickel Boys more compelling. So, you know, what argues for a book's worthiness is when it stays with you. And Underground, I had the idea in the year 2000 and 14 years later, it was still compelling and became the right time. So, you know, the ideas that you can't let go, you know, that keep sort of pulling at your arm are always the most worthwhile.

• 42:23Ezra Klein?

  This is just a very beautiful book about New York, among other things. And it's something I've seen in your writing about New York. Your other nonfiction book was a book of essays, in some ways, post 9/11 about New York. Is that there's this little bit of Elyseum tone, that you're always mourning this place disappearing. What do you think you would have loved about 1960s era Harlem that isn't there now?

• 42:47Speaker 01

  I did not know when I started my deep feelings for mid-century modern furniture. So, uh, so the first thing that came to my head was, uh, you know, those sleek lines of the, of the couches and the, and the armchairs. I really liked that furniture and describing it in the book and finding old pamphlets from the 50s and 60s and, and stealing that language for Carney's descriptions was fun. But, um, I'm really more of a 70s nostalgia guy, you know, um, birth of punk and disco and hip hop. So my real spiritual home is, um, late 70s, New York, early 80s. And I'm not nine years old. I'm 18 and I can actually

• 43:29Speaker 01

  go and see Suicide play at, at Seabijee's. I can see Liquid Liquid play the Mud Club or something. So that's really my, uh, the place I'd, I'd love to go.

• 43:39Ezra Klein?

  Is that part of the appeal of doing a sequel? You have to go there through your characters?

• 43:43Speaker 01

  Well, sadly, Carney's such a square, he's never going to Seabijee's. So-

• 43:47Ezra Klein?

  But he's, he's got kids.

• 43:48Speaker 01

  He does have kids. They're kind of young. I mean, there is some music stuff in, in the second book because of his kids, but he's definitely not going to Max's Kansas City and, and doing some lines with Iggy Pop.

• 44:00Ezra Klein?

  That'd be, that'd be a good scene. Let me ask you one other New York question, which is you, you did write this book of, of post nine 11 essays. We're now, we're just hitting the, the 20th anniversary of nine 11. How do you, how do you feel it, it ended up changing New York or, or for that matter, America?

• 44:15Speaker 01

  You know, I mean, in terms of the war on terror and the human cost of our missions overseas, ramifications have been incredibly terrible and defined so much of our, our lives, uh, that when you step back, it's, you know, really staggering. In terms of the city, I do have this long view, which is probably annoying, but, um, in going to the history of Harlem, I was reading these New York histories and we've always been-

• 44:45Speaker 01

  Under attack and maybe it's Native Americans we've displaced. It's a British, we have yellow fever, various plagues. The whole city burns down. We rebuild, we're laid low, then we come back. That seventies period I was just describing. And then the artists are working and they're inventing punk and disco and hip hop and New York salsa. If you check out Will Hermes, Love Comes to Buildings on Fire. That's just a great sort of chronicle of these different tribes coming together to make new art. And the broken city galvanizes them. And last year, walking around when we were in lockdown and the city was pretty dead. I felt the sense of despair, but also I knew, I knew we were coming back and walking around the summer.

• 45:30Speaker 01

  The neighborhoods I hate, like the Meatpacking District, two years ago, I would have been like, oh, the Meatpacking District, all these jerky loser tourists. But this time I was like, look at these lovely humans. We're all, we're back, man. We're all back and we're in together. And so I think we're always, we're always being knocked down in our personal lives. And the city's always taken these huge hits and we come back. So the city is a magnificent organism and it repairs itself.

• 45:57Ezra Klein?

  A couple of years ago, I read Moby's memoir of basically the early period of house music in New York and being part of that. And one thing that really struck me when I read it is how much that was a memoir of the kind of art you could have when housing was dirt cheap. It is a memoir of art being made in a place a lot of people didn't want to live because it was dangerous. It was gritty. You had, you know, these margins of society where amazing things could flower. So I really agree that nine 11 and attack won't break the spirit of New York or its ferment. But I kind of wonder if housing prices will, if, if you really can have, and I think I live out in, in San Francisco and I see the same thing here, which has had such an amazing art scene for so long.

• 46:39Ezra Klein?

  But a lot of those people are leaving because you can't live here doing that. I wonder if you think that's a, that's a threat to the New York you're talking about.

• 46:47Speaker 01

  Um, I don't think you have to be in New York to make great art. And, you know, pulling back to the last 60 years, you're in the West Village as a young artist. And then you're in the East Village, then in Lower East Side, and then you're in Brooklyn, and then you're in deep Brooklyn. And, um, yeah, I think you always find a way to make it work. You have no choice if you're going to make the art. And so that imperative overrules.

• 47:10Speaker 01

  The terrible conditions and terrible reality and you may have three jobs and you may have six roommates, but if you're gonna do it, you're gonna find those two hours to write a paragraph or to write the song. You have no choice.

• 47:27Ezra Klein?

  What's the art being made right now that excites you?

• 47:29Speaker 01

  Oh, um, I think lockdown has affected artists in different ways and um, some people can't write. Some people have no attention span. My damage is that I um, can only read stuff for work. So that's good for my work, but not good for my leisure reading. And so um, all I really do is just uh, at night I watch cooking shows and drink wine and try to get ready for the next day. So I haven't discovered anything new. I'm sort of in a rut that way. And that's my sort of lockdown damage.

• 48:04Ezra Klein?

  Let's talk about lockdown for a minute. And I want to do it by talking about something you said about zombies, which has always stuck with me, which is, quote, "I locate the terror of a zombie apocalypse in the idea that suddenly your friends, your family, your neighbors, the guy at the cafe, all these people can be revealed as the monsters you've always sort of suspected them to be."

• 48:25Ezra Klein?

  And the pandemic had a real feeling of that to me, the sense that suddenly everybody was a threat to you. You never knew what horror was lurking just in another person's exhalation. As somebody who'd spent all the time, you know, wrote a book on zombies, thinking about that, that world of zombies, did the pandemic feel a bit like a zombie apocalypse to you? Was there some resonance there?

• 48:46Speaker 01

  You know, um, definitely those first few months. And I think those kind of passages, I think I hit upon something. That's always been like my zombie construction is that um, it's your neighbors, your family being revealed as the monsters they really are that make, you know, the zombie story, you know, terrifying. But yeah, I think because I always dwell on the on the bad side, I think about my failures, my imagination in terms of the apocalypse. And so in Zone One, they're cleaning up after the apocalypse and trying to get rid of the zombies who are locked in their apartments and so they can restart society. But I had no idea how much toilet paper they would find when they found these leftover zombies. I didn't recognize that toilet paper hoarding

• 49:31Speaker 01

  would be so important. And I didn't realize that people would go, oh, you know, the zombie virus, it's like the flu, you know, who cares, you know, a zombie vaccine, I'm not gonna get that. That's crazy. You know, I have a high, I have a good constitution. So I think about how the plague played out in the last 18 months, and I dwell upon how how much I couldn't foresee because it was so silly and ridiculous.

• 49:55Ezra Klein?

  Let me ask you about the other side of that, which is the historical novels you've done and the way they maybe relate to that, which is in history, at various times, again and again, it turns out that many of us are monsters, can become monsters. You spend a lot of the last couple of years sitting with characters like that. Do you come away from it thinking some people are just evil? Or is there just always an explanation for the way our timber has been shaped?

• 50:23Speaker 01

  No, I mean, I think we have a great capacity for evil. You know, I think in The Nickel Boys, when I was touring with it, people would say, oh, this reform school reminds me of this home for unwed mothers in Ireland. This summer, you know, we learned about the, we learned more about the residential schools in Canada and the abuses there. So the kind of darkness I was describing, where the powerful bully and brutalize the less powerful is everywhere and it's part of our nature. And we don't, there's no shortage of reasons that we can abuse each other. And sometimes it's because Someone is powerless. Sometimes it's about race, or gender, or religion.

• 51:05Speaker 01

  Maybe we're just competing over the same water source, but we've always been this way. We've always been pretty terrible. And the evil part is the basic trait and the goodness and empathy and, and beautiful things that we can create is, you know, sometimes the exceptional thing.

• 51:23Ezra Klein?

  So you feel that the good is layered on. That's the one we have to work to achieve.

• 51:27Speaker 01

  Yes, we can often be pretty terrible to each other, and that's just how we're wired.

• 51:33Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, going back to my question earlier about human nature and, and watching kids, something that watching my toddler grow up is, has really convinced me of is that, not to sound too communist, but, but private property really does create a lot of tension in society. You, you really see the way once somebody owns something and nobody else can have it, or just once they own something and don't want anybody to get it, it really changes social dynamics pretty quickly. And I'm not saying there's an ideal alternative because people do wanna protect things that they like, but you see, you see how much resource wars are, are a pretty natural phenomenon. Once you hang out with a lot of two and a half year old boys and trucks.

• 52:12Speaker 01

  Well, once people get involved, things get terrible pretty quickly sometimes. I mean, I think like the idea for the reform schools and the nickel boys was a good one. You know, why are we gonna lock up little kids and teenagers who are juvenile offenders with adult criminals? Let's have a separate facility where they can get education and learn a skill. But then actually, when you implement that, you know, things go wrong. And I think, you know, there's a character in, in Harlem Shuffle named Pepper, who was like, you know, the consummate criminal. He's, he's a total pro. And he would get much further in life if he didn't have to like pull these heists with these total losers who always screwed up. So the, there's the platonic ideal of the job. You're gonna rob

• 52:56Speaker 01

  this bank. You're gonna rob this hotel. But then when you get humans involved, it gets degraded pretty quickly.

• 53:03Ezra Klein?

  As we wind down here, let me ask you before I do some book recommendations with you. To ask about your recommendations on on seeing good jobs pull off. I know you've watched a bunch of heist movies for this, read a bunch of books about heists. I'm somebody who enjoys a good a good heist. What would you recommend?

• 53:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think most of us know Ocean's Eleven, and that's one kind. That's a successful heist. Money's no object. So you can get the million dollar electromagnetic pulse machine that knocks out the security. I deal with a more low tech heist. And so my examples were the 50s, early 60s ones, like Rafifi, which is sort of like a heist template, French movie. Asphalt Jungle, The Killing, Stanley Kubrick's four into the heist. Low tech 70s crime movies like Taking a Pelon 123. Walter Matthau is in that one, and he's also in Charlie Varick. And I value his early 70s crime work. The Outfit, Robert Duvall. And then the films

• 54:01Speaker 01

  of Jean Pierre Melville, Red Circle, The Dysium Souf. I'm not sure if I pronounce that right. But he took American Noir and did his own, you know, crazy French spin on it and made these really hard boiled crime movies. So low tech, lo fi heists were my templates. They plan so hard, and I feel so bad for them when things go wrong.

• 54:26Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, I have a bit of that reaction, too. And then finally, always our last question here. What are three books that have influenced you that you'd recommend to the audience?

• 54:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'd mention again, Will Hermes, Love Goes to Buildings on Fire. This is a great history of New York music, 73 to like 77. And it goes into all, he's very agile. I can deal with these different types of music with authority and a very pleasant voice. Julia Otsuka, who writes short novels, once one every 10 years. She has one coming out next spring. But her first two books, Booty in the Attic, and When the Emperor Was Divine are great. And I thought about them a lot when I was writing The Nickel Boys, trying to get this, you know, compact, short novel together. And then a third one would

• 55:17Speaker 01

  be David Itzkoff's book about network, the movie Network, Mad as Hell. I was saying that I can only read stuff for work, but I could read like, books about movie history. And so I went back to Easy Rider: Raging Bulls, about the 70s film industry. And then Mad as Hell, which is a book about the filming of network. And now that I'm saying it, I've realized they're both 70s books. I'm writing about the 70s, so it was work. So I'm still, I'm still trapped, still trapped.

• 55:47Ezra Klein?

  Still, still doing it. Well, your new book is great. It's called Harlem Shuffle. Everybody should grab it. Colson Whitehead, thank you very much.

• 55:53Speaker 01

  Thanks a lot. Stay safe.

• 56:05Ezra Klein?

  The Zeklon Show is a production of New York Times Opinion. It is produced by Jeff Geld, Roche Karma, and Annie Galvin. Fact checking by Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones and mixing by Jeff Geld.