By Colson Whitehead in New York

The city is more than a setting, it is the city as a narrative matrix, in Colson Whitehead’s latest novel titled Criminal Rulepublished by Albin Michel in a translation by Charles Recoursé. The city of New York, whose social history the American author follows, succeeds with great mastery in connecting it to the action.

And there is action. This is the story of Ray Carney, a high-end furniture dealer on 125th Street, the charming heart of Harlem, the hero of a previous opus that took place in the 1950s. At the beginning of the 1970s, he is famous as a founder in his African-American community. , a beloved husband, father of two children, owner of two buildings and a comfortable apartment. Financial success that is partly the result of a past as a smuggler, illegal activities as an intermediary between mafias, rotten cops, various fences he did for a long time before he hung up his gloves. But now, his daughter May, fifteen years old, is bothering him so that he can get tickets to see the latest fashionable group, called the Jackson Five, a big challenge. One guy, Munson, an ultra-corrupt white detective, who hasn’t been seen in years, might have a tip. A quick walk, and back to normal life. Of course this does not go as planned, and Ray is lured into a night of criminal madness. It is literally a busy book, with great concentration, which multiplies the stories – each part, there are three, is almost a mini-novel in itself, which always uses new characters, sketched in a few lines by physical, family genealogical, and social character. position Each paragraph is like a drawer, and the novel is like one of the pieces of furniture sold by its main character: functional and practical.

a drawer

It is in this way of writing, sometimes expressing event and context on the scale of a sentence, that Colson Whitehead writes a sensitive story about New York, just at street level. As the writer, almost, one could say gluttonous, style enhances every news, every place, every character with details. Example: During the crime spree, Ray and Munson meet again up town in a run-down neighborhood, where some Corky Bell has taken over the operation of a rotten harbor, the Aloha, which he renovated to make it one of the most famous and chic gambling dens in the a town, a semi-transparent casino where the Italian underground was, Hollywood actors, respectable white people in the cellar and rotten cops meet: in a few pages the book describes a place there the New York in full confidence, with complex power relations between different communities, and a heist worthy of the best genre film.

It is really a New York in transition that the characters travel through in the seventies that saw crime flourish, arson​​​​​​to commit insurance fraud, political violence between black movements that were ‘increasingly radical and going against the mafia, and an increasingly brutal white police force. The whole interest of the book is paradoxically based on the shifting foundations of this changing city, whose characters never cease to mourn the decline, but whose supposed golden age is very residence shown as deception, construction. A situation summed up in the last lines of the book: “the neighbors complained; it was not like it was before, they said, we preferred the way it was before. They always said when the old town left to make way for something new. ” End of session. Something that could be said about all cities and the way we see them.