If you'd asked me to read a 600-plus page novel about a Harlem furniture salesman trying to walk a line between the crooked and straight worlds, I might not have felt I had the stamina. But I blasted through these two recent books back to back, and I think they've cemented Colson Whitehead as my favorite contemporary American writer.
They're not exactly novels. Each book takes a decade as its broad theme and traces the story of Ray Carney through three novella-sized capers that are equal parts crime story and equal parts social history. Carney is a good guy who's basically just trying to run a furniture store and look after his family, but he's been a fence in the past and he can't quite escape the ties to his old life. I read Crook Manifesto first, which is set in the early-mid seventies, then backtracked to Harlem Shuffle, which begins around the turn of the sixties. You'd read them in publication order, ideally, but I didn't feel that my enjoyment was in any way tempered by taking them out of sequence. If you've encountered Whitehead before (I've read The Intuitionist, Zone One and Underground Railroad, so still have a way to go) you'll expect to be dazzled on an almost line-by-line basis, and these books don't disappoint. I presume there's going to be another set of Carney stories and I'm already looking forward to it.
