Colson Whitehead's new novel, The Underground Railroad, is an Oprah's Book Club pick that's been attracting a lot of attention, as well as rave reviews. The New York native is known for his wide-ranging style — his work has drawn comparisons to everyone from Dashiell Hammett to Jonathan Swift, and from Toni Morrison to Gabriel García Márquez. In The Underground Railroad, Whitehead shifts style again, tackling slavery in the American South in a way that blends history and fantasy. He imagines that the Underground Railroad was really — as many children, including Whitehead, thought when they first heard the term — a train that transported runaway slaves from the American South to freedom in the North.

Eleanor Wachtel spoke to Colson Whitehead from a studio in New York.

My first job out of college was working in the books section of the Village Voice, an alternative weekly in New York City. It was my job to open the 40 books a day we got from publishers, and we only reviewed 40 books a month. So that was my introduction to how capricious the whole industry really is. I would see first novels that were autobiographical, and it was the early '90s, so there were all the Gen X novels of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. And just being from New York and very urban, I couldn't relate to a certain kind of Southern African-American novel. Being exposed to what you're supposed to do as a young writer, a debut writer, an African-American writer — I wanted to avoid that. So that meant, if I was going to write about race, finding a different way of doing it that hadn't been done before.

The hardest part was, after I'd done the research and was getting ready to write, knowing what I was going to have to put [main character] Cora and all the other people on the plantation through, just to be realistic. It's horrifying to think that people went through that. It's horrifying enough to know that people in my family went through it, and I don't know their names — I don't even know where they came from in Africa or where they died. Once I started writing, there's that first section, a prologue, dealing with Ajarry, who's Cora's grandmother. For me, it's an overture of the book and an introduction to a typical life of a slave. That was hard. And then once I got over that hump I could execute the rest of the book, confronting the horror of slavery and then trying to figure out a language, and a tool — which is the narrator — to make sense of it in a way that's going to work for a reader, work as a creative project.

​I wanted to talk about different ideas of where the black community is going. Some of those ideas were articulated by Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois in the 19th and early 20th centuries. And look at how some of the rhetoric is still valuable now. We're talking about the same sorts of things now as we did then. Can we save some slaves who are so damaged by the "peculiar institution" that they can't join us in this post-Civil War world? Who do we leave behind, and who do we take? Who can we take with us into this next iteration of black society? It's the same sort of rhetoric you hear now when people talk about "respectability politics," as it's called. You know — "Pull your pants up! How do you expect to get a leg up in society when you've been so eaten up by the inner city, with its drugs and alcohol and poor behaviour?" It's not about pulling your pants up. There are a lot of systems at work. As I was trying to come up with speeches for some of the people in my book, there's just so much overlap between then and now that I didn't even have to force a lot of the comparisons.