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.
Thank you AR, now i know what i will read next🖤
ReplyDeleteThe new novella - The Dagger in Vichy - is up for preorder on Subterranean Press.
ReplyDeleteThanks for letting us know, Orin! Pre-ordered.
DeleteHi Alastair,
ReplyDeleteSorry for this unrelated question...
The cover art for the Subterranean Press release of A Dagger in Vichy feels like a new direction, both for your work and for them. I was curious: were you involved in choosing or shaping the design?
All the best!
Yes, I gave some suggested directions to Sub Press (the Medieval manuscript look, basically) and we worked through some variations on the theme until there was one we all liked.
DeleteI read Zone One when it came out, and I thought it was a very solid novel as well as a good example of a "literary" fiction writer unafraid of criticism for playing in a genre sandbox.
ReplyDeleteAs David Mitchell put it: "The idea of an entire genre being unworthy if your attention is a bizarre act of self-harm."
He said that in an interview just ahead of the release of Slade House, his incredibly fun and freaky 2015 horror novel. He's dipped into SF as well with An Orison of Somni-451 in Cloud Atlas, some of the late chapters of The Bone Clocks, and possibly my favorite, the Zookeeper AI from Ghostwritten, his first novel.
Anyway, I'd forgotten about The Dagger In Vichy and I'm excited to read it. Will there be a Kindle edition?