![]() ![]() "Then I got thinking about - I was writing about cities a lot - I was thinking about zoning regulations, and how streets are named, and how we decide what's a business zone and what's a residential zone. At the time, I thought, 'Oh, that's such a weird sort of industry.' And I put that thought away, to work on it sometime. ![]() "In 1997 or maybe '96, the New York Times Magazine had an article about the naming of Prozac and it talked to a bunch of pharmaceutical namers. In 2002, the author received his MacArthur Fellowship (the so-called "genius grant"), a highly singular career-choice validation.Īpex Hides the Hurt was begun not long after publication of John Henry Days, Whitehead said, and was inspired in part by a nonfiction piece he'd read years earlier. That something led to his second novel, John Henry Days, which was published in 2001 and was named an Editors' Choice by the New York Times Book Review ("A voice so intelligent and an idiom so imaginative that it can lift the reader right out of his chair"). I'd actually quit about a week before I found out that the book was being published, so I guess there was something in the air." "So I figured I would go back to freelancing and start another book. "I had paid back all the debts I had incurred while writing The Intuitionist," he explained. Whitehead had, in fact, already quit his then-day job (at a computer company). "When Anchor Books bought The Intuitionist, I called my mom and was very excited she's like, 'Well don't quit your day job.' I'm like, 'I'm published! I have a little money, I can work on something else.' They just didn't understand how it sort of worked." "They're both business people," Whitehead said, "so when I first started working at The Voice, they were a little alarmed at the annual income of a freelance writer. The book's publication validated the author's leap into fiction, even if it failed to completely reassure his practical-minded parents. His first published novel was The Intuitionist (1999), which a San Francisco Chronicle reviewer called "magical" and compared to Catch-22 and The Bluest Eye. "After four or five years of doing that," he said, "I became confident to start writing fiction." Whitehead started at the Voice Literary Supplement and then began writing book and TV and music reviews. So I learned to work under deadline, and to be more focused." I was a big procrastinator, but if you want to keep your lights on, you have to hand in the piece on time. and it gave me some really good work habits. "I met my wife there, made a lot of good friends there. "It was a really fun time," the author said of his stint at that Manhattan weekly, where he joined the staff in 1991. Nonetheless, the realistic details of Whitehead's fiction seem firmly (if sometimes ironically) rooted in fact - thanks, perhaps, to the years he spent (after a Harvard education) working for The Village Voice. "He dealt in lies and promises, distilled them into syllables," the novel says of its main figure, who maneuvers in a world where the lines separating infomercials from popular culture from "real-life" often appear irreparably blurred. the new anti-shyness drug"), while he himself remains unnamed throughout the book. In Apex Hides the Hurt, for instance, the protagonist is a "nomenclature consultant" who makes his living giving names to corporate products (" Loquacia. Indeed, a reader may discern conceptual echoes of those three writers (as well, perhaps, as such Marvel Comics masters as Frank Miller, John Byrne, and Chris Claremont) in Whitehead's fiction, where beleaguered or wounded individuals struggle to find meaningful personal identities in a slightly surreal and menacing world. "And then in college I started reading more 20th-century authors - people like Nathanael West and Thomas Pynchon and Ralph Ellison, who were very good models for me when I was trying to find my voice." ![]() "In high school, Crime and Punishment I thought was a real eye-opener," he recalled with a chuckle. But it wasn't long before future-novelist Whitehead discovered more mature literature. ![]()
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