Colson Whitehead’s History of the United States

Extract

Picking a Genre

Since the publication of his first novel twenty years ago, Colson Whitehead has become one of the most lauded, prized, taught, and studied American novelists writing today. Winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” grant and the nearly-as-lucrative honor of Oprah’s Book Club, and the most contemporary novelist included in the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Whitehead stands at the very center of the contemporary canon. According to critics and scholars alike, part of what makes Whitehead so singular is his ability to write across a vast array of literary and mass-cultural forms: detective and encyclopedic fiction (The Intuitionist [1999], John Henry Days [2001]), contemporary satire and the bildungsroman (Apex Hides the Hurt [2006], Sag Harbor [2009]), and more recently, postapocalyptic zombie fiction and the meta-slave narrative (Zone One [2011], The Underground Railroad [2016]).

Indeed, Whitehead’s play with genre is so well-known and self-conscious that he has even joked about it publicly in the pages of The New York Times. Before the release of his zombie novel, Zone One, Whitehead published an essay titled “Picking a Genre” (2009), in which he describes his artistic process: “If you’re anything like me, figuring out what to write next can be a real hassle. To make things easier, I modified my dartboard a few years ago. Now, when I’m overwhelmed by the untold stories out there, I head down to the basement, throw a dart and see where it lands. Try it for yourself!” (23). What follows is a list of targets on that dartboard, both a catalog and a send-up of the genres that characterize contemporary American fiction: from the “Encyclopedic” novel for the “postmodern, or postmodern-curious,” to the “Ethnic Bildungsroman,” “Little Known Historical Fact,” and “Southern Novel of Black Misery” (23).