‘The two Pulitzers haven’t changed much’: Colson Whitehead, ‘America’s storyteller’

He still has his dreadlocks. We worried about it, with the honors due to its double Pulitzer (a double that only three authors, including Faulkner and Updike, achieved before him), decorated with a National Book Award, the new glory of American letters had changed? Did Colson Whitehead keep a cool head? “I’m still the same, he tells us straight away in a stentorian voice that resonates in the glass office of his publisher Albin Michel. You know, for twenty-five years, I’ve had ups and downs. low; today, I am delighted that people appreciate my books [NDLR : Underground Railroad a glané plus d’un million de lecteurs dans les seuls Etats-Unis], but what matters is to write what I want to write. And the two Pulitzers haven’t changed a whole lot, I’m the same depressed guy I’ve always been.”

To believe that he hides his game well, “the storyteller of America” ​​- as displayed on his front page Time Magazine in July 2019 – all smiles during his visit to Paris, juggling between his multiple audiovisual interviews, a rare solicitation for non-French-speaking authors.

It’s for Harlem Shuffle, released in the United States in the summer of 2021, that the 53-year-old New Yorker crossed the Atlantic. We are delighted as this 8th novel once again demonstrates the extent of his talent. After a fiction about an elevator inspector (The Intuitionist)a zombie novel (Zone 1)a teenage story (Case Harbor)a novel about slavery (Underground Railroad) and another on segregation in the South (Nickel Boys)here is a thriller, a “crime novel”, about Harlem in the 1960s. A new genre for him?

“I got rid of that notion. It’s just another way of exploring the world, like Philip Roth did with his dystopian Conspiracy against AmericaToni Morrison with Beloved and his ghost, Kazuo Ishiguro in Always with mealmost a story of SF…” But here, his inspirations are elsewhere, he confides to us, on the side of films The Red Circle, Rififi in men, Ocean’s Elevenor Chester Himes, Richard Stark alias Donald Westlake, Patricia Highsmith, whose characters hesitate between good and evil, like his hero Ray Carney.

Rififi in Harlem

A hell of a hero that Ray Carney. Motherless, son of a thug, Ray Carney should have fallen into the “evil” camp, but this furniture dealer on 125th Street, who pays little attention to the provenance of the trinkets (radios, televisions) that he resells in his back office, is “just a bit of a trickster”. Unlike his gambler cousin, Freddie, who has a knack for getting into dirty tricks and getting Ray into it. It is that in the Harlem of the years 1959-1964, abound gangsters, criminals, robbers and drug dealers. As for the transferred cops uptown, they quickly acquire “a doctorate in the sciences of extortion”. With his pen soaked in the slang of the time, the author paints a marvelous portrait of all this little world, soon embarked on the heist of the Theresa hotel, the epicenter of cultural life where all the stars go down of color. A deliciously narrated robbery.

Further on, Colson Whitehead examines the select Dumas Club, reserved for the black bourgeoisie, where Ray intends to buy respectability. Betrayed by a crooked banker, the furniture dealer soon concocts a revenge with small onions. The paintings follow one another – notably the riots of the summer of 1964 following the murder of a young black man by a white policeman -, fed by an in-depth knowledge of New York at the time.

Because Colson Whitehead is a hard worker. Scouting in the streets, reading the archives of the New York Times and Memoirs of thugs and gangsters, immersed in the furnishing booklets of the time, sociological study of the neighborhoods and mores of a Big Apple very fragmented and undermined by racism – the black community, affected by “colorism” , don’t escape it… the Manhattan resident leaves nothing to chance in this first volume of a trilogy – the second part will be devoted to the 1970s, and the third to the very “Trumpian” 1980s. True living memory of New York, Colson Whitehead has not finished enthroned in the firmament of American letters.

Harlem Shuffle, by Colson Whitehead, trans. from English by Charles Recoursé. Albin Michel, 432 pages, €22.90.