Understanding Colson Whitehead by Derek C. Maus;

Author:Derek C. Maus;
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

Whitehead’s “New York Trilogy”

The Colossus of New York, Sag Harbor, and Zone One

Although it is the novelist Paul Auster who published a book bearing the title The New York Trilogy (1987), three of Whitehead’s remaining books constitute a collective commentary on “New York, the city, where it’s going, where it’s been” (Goble 65). Although there is no indication that Whitehead envisioned formally grouping these works together as a literary trilogy, there are enough thematic overlaps among The Colossus of New York: A City in Thirteen Parts (2003), Sag Harbor (2009), and Zone One (2011) to justify examining them as a unit.

As Phillip Lopate noted in his review of The Colossus of New York, Whitehead has “always written about New York” to some extent; although never explicitly named, the Manhattan-like urban setting of The Intuitionist is “a mythological, stylized backdrop of power and corruption, similar to Gotham in Tim Burton’s Batman film.” Likewise, New York is “the fallback media-hype center” (Lopate) from which both J. Sutter in John Henry Days and the protagonist of Apex Hides the Hurt venture outward into a Middle America that they loathe and only barely comprehend. Each of the three books considered in this chapter, however, features Whitehead’s native New York (and related outlying places) as a more integral part of both its geographical and cultural settings.

Especially after staging a zombie apocalypse in his hometown in Zone One, Whitehead has frequently been asked about his feelings toward New York. Although his affinity for the city is unmistakable—“I’m definitely a New Yorker…. I’ve tried living other places, but I always end up coming back here” (Porter 25)—his answers also indicate a dynamic tension between love and loathing. In discussing Zone One, Whitehead wryly noted that “the city has shaped how I see the world, move through the world. I don’t think it will come as a surprise that my view of New York after everybody’s dead is not too far from how I perceive New York now, when everybody’s dead—I mean, trying to make it through the day” (Madrigal). In another interview Whitehead mentioned writing about the simultaneously vibrant and violent New York of the 1970s in which he came of age: “It was so dirty, you were constantly on guard from predators, and it’s so cleaned up now that thinking about how it used to be with the danger and the garbage and buildings on fire…. That old New York is gone, and that’s one thing that’s undiscoverable now but I explore in my fiction” (Shukla 103).

These ambivalent feelings shape literary settings that evoke tangible, distinctive aspects of New York while also serving as symbolic microcosms. Even though New York has been his home for all but a few years of his life, Whitehead is adamant that the localized, mildly autobiographical dimensions of the three books he has set there do not supplant broader identifications that his readers—New Yorkers or not—might make with his plots and characters. He made this clear in discussing The Colossus of New York with Evette Porter: “I think I identify myself with the metropolis.

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