Everyone Thinks They Know Who Whitman Kessler Is

You don’t.

Is Whitman Kessler white? Is he even Jewish?  Are those blue eyes real, or are they tinted contact lenses? Is he a genius or a fake? Is he an egomaniac, or is he simply trying to survive in a world that defines him before he gets the chance to define himself? 

Whitman has spent most of his life talking to another version of himself. He calls him K.

K is a nag hovering on Whitman's shoulder. And yet, K loves Whitman, and Whitman would not know what to do without K guiding him. K tells Whitman when to smile, when to shut up, and when to walk into a room with an attitude. K has been there since Whitman was young, helping him navigate a world that seemed to know who Whitman Kessler was before Whitman did. Whitman didn't always listen. But, for most of Whitman's adult life, the arrangement worked.

Whitman is Whitman, but the world he encounters has ideas of him based on assumptions and judgments.  In order to highlight the disconnect between how Whitman sees himself and the way the world wants to shape him, the novel never explicitly says that he is a mixed-race Black man until the the final page. And even then, the revelation is never explicit.

The reader encounters his Jewish surname, his Yale education. The reader learns he was married to a surgeon, has light-blue eyes, played tennis in college, and has a daughter in private school.  

The omission of his race implicates the reader in the same judgment that follows Whitman throughout his life: seeing him, interpreting him, and deciding who he must be before fully knowing who he is.

After years of struggle to become the writer he wants to be, Whitman finally writes 001-054—and the blades of critical scrutiny are sharp.  The world wonders whether Whitman is the sort of writer who could have written such a book. The reader wonders why because the world he encounters is always wondering why. Who is Whitman Kessler, really? 

The setup makes for psychological war between Whitman and the his critics and between Whitman and K, who is trying to steer him though the gauntlet of scrutiny even as Whitman refuses to deny his genuine self. 

Written partly under the influence of ketamine, Whitman's novel imagines a future in which human authorship has been erased and his human protagonist, also a writer, attempts to pass as AI. Whitman writes beyond the limits K has spent a lifetime enforcing, and the result becomes Whitman's surprise literary sensation. The writer who spent years struggling in obscurity is suddenly everywhere. 

Readers see how critics question his choices, his process, even whether he fully understands what he has created. More insidiously, people keep offering him recognizable versions of himself to inhabit—Baldwin, Morrison, Roth, Updike. K urges him to listen, to adapt to what the world is saying. His agent laments that if he were to lean more into his "background," he would do better in the market. Whitman must decide whether to shape himself into someone the world already knows how to understand or risk everything on what he can imagine.  

Because of who he is, creation itself is an act of rebellion against a world for whom the right to imagine is limited to those who are granted that right.  In writing 001-054, Whitman has written himself, through characters named Sebastian, an AI named Turing, and a technical analyst named Marcel, who edits a diagnostic manual of psychiatric conditions.  One line from Turing mirrors Whitman's own longing to be free of the world's judgment. "You gave me a voice, and then you put me in a cage."

As 001-054 moves toward the highest levels of literary recognition, Whitman’s dependence on K becomes increasingly difficult to sustain. 

In the novel, the Whitman Prize is a literary award for which Whitman is named a finalist.  As he prepares for a trip to San Francisco to receive the award, he calls his mother to tell her the news. For most of his life, people have wondered about his name, Whitman, because it never seemed to fit with the Kessler part of him.  He never actually knew why he was named Whitman, and she tells him his birth father, a poet and jazz musician, named him for Walt Whitman himself, hoping his son might grow up to embody the beauty of life and language Walt Whitman had meant to his birth father, who died when Whitman was four.  

At that moment, Whitman feels completely changed. He feels chosen. He feels whole. He leaves the boarding line, rents a baby blue Mustang, and travels west through a fractured American landscape that cannot decide its past, present, or future.

At the Continental Divide, Whitman begins his descent toward the end of the map. He hears the voices of his past, the people who insisted on defining him their way. Then he finally hears the true words of his daughter. In the opening chapter, he believes she asks, “Dad, did you love your book?”

Now he hears what she really said.

“Daddy, did you love me?”

As Whitman descends from the top of the continent to the ocean, K leaves him with a final farewell: Goodbye, Whit. You’re on your own, love.

At the end, we realize Whitman was never broken. The world that kept forcing him into fractured categories was. Then, in one final moment of human recognition, a woman sees him whole.

On the Oregon coast, he meets a woman who asks him in for coffee. Whitman says he takes his with “a touch of cream.” She holds his gaze, then looks toward the stormy western sky, where a touch of blue has just opened.

“That’s beautiful,” she tells him. “The color of you.”

For some four hundred pages, the reader has been drawn into the same assumptions the world makes about Whitman. Whitman's name, his family, his Yale education, his light blue eyes, his place in the literary world—all invite judgment. Yet Whitman himself refuses the categories the reader expects protagonists of contemporary literature to dramatize.

The novel is a story, a drama. But certain themes do emerge. 001-054 is about the violence of judgment, when the world says: You are this, so you cannot be that. When your mind, your imagination, your humanity are prescribed by the world that employs, monetizes, and maximizes. When the human being is colonized by power. And when one individual says no. I refuse.