URBAN LEGEND

Closing out a crime trilogy about a changing New York, Colson Whitehead excavates his own foundations.

- JULIAN LUCAS —Lindsay Turner

"I'm a really lazy bitch, but I have a punitive superego," Whitehead says. "The two go together."

I was standing at the corner of Ninety-third and Broadway, scanning an empty storefront for signs of literary activity, when Colson Whitehead texted: “Behind you.” It was a clear May afternoon. Whitehead had invited me to his office but specified only the intersection; spinning around, I spotted a dreadlocked figure in shades and a suede jacket, slouched on a bench in the median. Once I’d crossed, he rose to greet me, revealing, on the seat, a plaque that read “Colson Whitehead’s Office.” He cracked a smile. “Got it for my birthday last November,” he said. “No urine or dead animals yet.”

Whitehead, fifty-six, has a reddish-brown complexion, hooded, inquisitive eyes, and a lightly salted mustache-goatee, which, along with his locs, brings to mind mail-order portraits of Black Jesus. He’s long-limbed but unobtrusive in his movements, like a suave giraffe on the lam, an impression reinforced by his tapering brown Chelsea boots. “It’s a weird culture, people who sit on benches,” he said, laughing with a snort for punctuation. A thief in his latest novel uses them for reconnaissance, watching Broadway traffic “until every vector of every possible getaway was a filament in my web.”

Soon, we were riding the elevator to his apartment, in a prewar building near Riverside Park. Whitehead has enjoyed one of the smoothest ascents in contemporary American literature, from his celebrated 1999 début, “The Intuitionist,” a mystery novel about elevator inspectors, to his back-to-back Pulitzers for “The Underground Railroad” (2016) and “The Nickel Boys” (2019). His ten other, wildly disparate books include two satires of media and marketing and an elegiac zombie novel set in Manhattan.

Like New Yorkers fighting over favorite neighborhoods, devoted readers often reproach one another for their ignorance of the