June 29, 2026 Issue

Colson Whitehead is primarily known for his novels. I realize that. He’s won two Pulitzers for them, so why not? But to me, he’s the writer of the brilliant The Colossus of New York (2003) – a vivid, lyrical, ruminative portrait of New York City. It’s one of my favorite books. I call it a portrait. But it’s actually unclassifiable. Its subtitle is “A City in Thirteen Parts.” That’s a pretty good capsule of the book’s essence.

Reading Julian Lucas’s absorbing profile of Whitehead in this week’s New Yorker, I was curious to see if he mentions Colossus. I didn’t have to wait long. Eight paragraphs in, Lucas writes, “More than twenty years ago, he described New York as a city that ‘multiplies when you’re not looking.’ ” Lucas doesn’t say so, but that’s a quote from Colossus: 

The New York City you live in is not my New York City; how could it be. This place multiplies when you’re not looking. We move over here, we move over there. Over a life-time, that adds up to a lot of neighborhoods, the motley construction material of your jerry-built metropolis.

Later in his piece, Lucas refers to the book expressly:

He pivoted to a book of essays, drawing its title, “The Colossus of New York” (2003), from one of the sci-fi monsters of his childhood movie nights. They’re playful, intimate sketches, each sentence an errant transmission from the city’s collective consciousness. In the essay “Port Authority,” Whitehead eavesdrops on the dreams of eager new arrivals; in “Morning,” on the unspoken indignities of the daily commute. “You are a New Yorker when what was there is more real and solid than what is here now,” he writes in the introduction. Later, he adds, “New York City does not hold our former selves against us. Perhaps we can extend the same courtesy.”

Lucas goes on to say of Colossus, “The slim volume marked the beginning of a transformation, though several years passed before it ramified.”

Lucas concludes his illuminating piece with another quote from Colossus. He writes,

What’s a novel but a big score of details burgled from the world? And what’s a novelist but a fence, furnishing imaginary scenes with choice pieces of reality while obscuring their provenance? Over the years, it becomes clear that he does what he does not just for the money, or even for the thrill, but because it makes him part of the churn, a safe for the secrets of a city so quick to change that, as Whitehead writes in “Colossus,” “we can never make proper goodbyes.”

Lucas gives The Colossus of New York its due. I laud him for doing so.  

June 4 & 11, 2012 Issue

One thing I’ve learned from writing this blog is that The New Yorker never lets me down. No matter how uninteresting its contents may first appear, a closer look always yields at least a pearl or two of reading bliss. This week’s Science Fiction Issue is a case in point. Monsters, zombies, humanoids, and aliens aren’t my cup of tea. I was dispiritedly paging through the magazine, thinking this issue might be the first about which I had absolutely nothing good to say, when I came to Colson Whitehead’s “A Psychotronic Childhood.” The first line (“Growing up on the Upper East Side in the nineteen-seventies, I was a bit of a shut-in”) hooked me. I immediately read the piece straight through, and enjoyed it immensely. It helped that I’d previously read Whitehead’s The Colossus of New York (2003), which features one of the catchiest, coolest opening sentences I’ve ever read (“I’m here because I was born here and thus ruined for anywhere else, but I don’t know about you”). Encountering Whitehead in the Science Fiction Issue was like discovering an old friend in a roomful of intimidating strangers. Tucked within the pages containing “A Psychotronic Childhood” is a one-page piece titled “Olds Rocket 88, 1950” by William Gibson. My eyes strayed to it, lighting on this delightful construction: “The zeitgeist was chewy with space-flavored nuggets, morsels of futuristic design, precursors of a Tomorrow whose confident glow was visible beyond the horizon of all that was less wonderful, provided one had eyes to see it.” Provided one had eyes to see it. Thank goodness, I had eyes to see Gibson’s piece. It’s whetted my appetite for more Gibson, a writer whose work was, before now, unknown to me. I’m considering reading one of his novels. For me, that's a big step. I much prefer fact to fantasy.