Colson Whitehead just wants to have fun

For ‘The Underground Railroad,’ about the harrowing escape from slavery, director Barry Jenkins took a novel step: hiring a mental health counselor.“A fence is in between the straight world and the crooked world,” says the author, and that position — its duality and precarious nature — shapes Carney’s circumstances, movements and personality. Whitehead found inspiration in Highsmith’snovels, “Ripley’s divided self.

Metaphorically speaking, Whitehead says, “Being a fence, in its in-betweenness, is particularly suited to the way I see things.” Many of his characters occupy unsettled middle spaces with fragile borders — between childhood and adulthood , freedom and captivity , life and zombie death . “I sometimes make my protagonists into writers,” he says.

“Sag Harbor,” a comedic autobiographical reflection on a teenager’s summer in the Hamptons, is almost entirely plotless. Its structure is as dissimilar to the propulsive heists of “Harlem Shuffle” as its tone is to the somber register of “The Nickel Boys.” “Different stories demand different tools, different ways of talking about the world,” says Whitehead. If fans of his Pulitzer winners can’t get behind a revelrous crime novel, he doesn’t care.

“Other people’s expectations aren’t really my problem, so I don’t think about them,” he says. “Changing up is part of my process, it’s how I work, and I’ve always realized that people come aboard and then get off at different stops. All I can do is the work that I find personally compelling.”Right now, that work is a second Carney book, also in three parts, set in the 1970s. “I find the constraint of 110, 120 pages interesting to play with, and I have more things to say about Carney,” he says.

Could there be even more Carney books? “I can’t say,” he says. “I don’t feel obligated to do anything. If it’s not fun, I’ll just stop. If it’s not fun, I’ll do something else.”

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