Careers are seldom as straightforward as those of Whitehead: Growing up in Manhattan in a wealthy environment, elite school, Harvard, journalist with “The Village Voice” and, after the publication of the science fiction parable “The Intuitionist”, already from the national US feature section for the Celebrated debut of the year.
Jonathan Franzen compared Whitehead’s second title “John Henry Days” with “Ulysses” and “Moby Dick”, but not without the following sentence that the book was not a page turner. Now you can argue about whether you really can’t put “Ulysses” and “Moby Dick” away at any point without feverishly waiting to see how things continue (“Moby Dick” in the course of the story). “Unwavering narration”, devoting oneself to detail by detail, could in any case be used as a link to James Joyce, Herman Melville and Whitehead.
Just don’t cross 110th Street
This unswerving storytelling, always along the historical fault lines of the “People of Color” in the USA, brought him his greatest success: Whitehead was the third writer in history to win the Pulitzer Prize twice, in 2017 for “The Underground Railroad” , 2020 for “The Nickel Boys”. “Underground Railroad” can currently be seen as a highly regarded series on Amazon Prime.
So now “Harlem Shuffle”, a title that immediately awakens associations: “Just move it right here / To the Harlem Shuffle / Huh, yeah, yeah, yeah / Do the Harlem Shuffle”. But Whitehead is not about the dance move that the Rolling Stones memorialized with their interpretation of a song by Bob & Earl, but about the other “Harlem Shuffle”, the seething Harlem during the 60s, surrounded by racist ones Limits; just don’t cross 110th Street. Bobby Womack’s song “Across 110th Street” (see the film of the same name by and with Anthony Quinn) is the much better soundtrack for the book than the Stones number:
„Doing whatever I had to do to survive/I’m not saying what I did was alright/Trying to break out of the ghetto was a day to day fight/(…) Across 110th Street/Pushers won’t let the junkie go free“
Double life, Harlem style
Ray Carney lives in the middle of this pressure cooker with his wife Elisabeth, who is just expecting their second child. Elisabeth’s parents settle for the Harlem elite, who are copying the white system of corruption and nepotism under black auspices. Carney, on the other hand, grew up alone with his father, a petty criminal that everyone on the streets still knows, even though he has long since passed away. But Carney doesn’t just live between the dirty, brutal Harlem world of his own family and the mendacious Etepetete world of his wife’s family.
He lives in the middle of both worlds. As a self-made man, he studied economics and built a furniture business. But if you as a black person in Harlem want to gradually expand and build something, if you don’t want a larger apartment with your second child right next to the elevated railway, if you finally want to be taken seriously by your father-in-law, you need money – and a black man from Harlem is not thrown at the bank for that. And so Ray hires himself out as a fence. Because whoever says A must also say B, he becomes increasingly entangled in criminal machinations against his will.
Pulsating and bathed in sepia
The book draws its suspense from the contrast between the two worlds and the constant danger that they will collide, that Ray’s whole construct of a double life implodes like one of the newfangled televisions he is selling more and more of in his shop. And from the fact that the involuntary gangster escapades of Ray become a game of cat and mouse in which Ray is not the cat. Is the noose tightening? That definitely has Pageturner qualities.
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In addition, Whitehead describes the Harlem of the 60s in great detail. Almost casually, right at the beginning, using a single scene in a dusty shop, he tells of how the TV era is replacing the radio era, and delivers part of Harlem’s history at the same time, you can feel the pulsation of the city and read it. If you will, it is these epic spaces in the middle of a book, which is certainly not an epic and does not want to be one at all, that make the text something special.
In addition, the book provides a historical foundation for a deeper understanding of the “Black Lives Matter” movement. Ray witnessed the Harlem riot in 1964 after a black guy was shot by police. A black resistance movement is forming. Ray’s wife works in a travel agency that works out travel routes for its black customers, where you are halfway safe from racist attacks and where you can find motels that will take you in.
Causal instead of association chains
Whitehead not only lived in New York for the rest of his life. He also devoted a lot of time to the targeted location scouting in Harlem for the book. You are taken to this Harlem. He shares the density of narration with Pyncheon, but not his narrative anarchy, not his wild rattling with the chain of associations. At most, Whitehead rattles with causal chains. If-then relationships are stringently declined. One thing makes another in Ray’s life. And when society is like this, it affects Ray’s life like this.
Event notice
Colson Whitehead will read from “Harlem Shuffle” on October 13th at the Konzerthaus in Vienna.
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As much as Whitehead puts the readership into Harlem of the 60s, just as little he puts them in the heart and mind of his protagonist. It remains strangely flat, although the ambivalence that it lives is at the center of the plot. He’s just a criminal on the one hand and a righteous citizen on the other. At no point does one get a feeling for whether it might tear him apart.
A lot of material for further series
So the book is tension-driven, atmospherically dense, historically versed and provides education for everyone who wants to understand “Black Lives Matter” better. In terms of narration, however, the ideas do not overturn, in terms of language Whitehead remains on the ground, and his characters experience a lot, but we don’t really get to know them. In any case, the story has a lot to offer for a streaming series. And then it is up to the actors to give their characters depth.
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