I’ve been remiss in reporting on my reading. Here are some of my recent reads.
Colson Whitehead is a great writer. He’s published three novels in the last five years and two of them have won the Pulitzer Prize. He also won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2016. The man has skills.
This book is a little lighter in tone and a bit more fun than his previous works. I liked it a lot. This book is set (naturally) in Harlem and begins in 1959. The protagonist is an enjoyable character named Ray Carney who is a husband, father and the owner of Carney’s Furniture on 125th street. Carney is a decent man and a striving furniture retailer but with a sideline in fencing. For a small fee he will take your stolen TV or radio or brooch to a retailer downtown.
He doesn’t consider himself a crook, though. From his perspective he is just “facilitating the churn” of stolen objects, transforming them into legit merchandise. Through his cousin Freddy, though, he does get involved in a real crime. Freddie and his ne’er do well friends enlist him as a fence for their stickup of the Hotel Theresa, “Headquarters of the Negro world”. Whitehead’s description of the heist is fun. “Robbing the Hotel Theresa,” Whitehead writes, was like “slipping Jackie Robinson a Mickey the night before the World Series.” The ramifications of this theft and Carney’s reluctant involvement trigger a series of events, near-misses, murders, tragedies, and thrills that drive the novel’s action.
Ray Carney is a man of wit and a street corner philosopher. He’s also a dedicated family man who loves his wife and child. On the other hand, his in-laws can’t stand him – for one thing, he’s darker than their light-skinned daughter, and he isn’t part of the “Talented Tenth” they’d preferred she marry.
“… Says she wants herself a college man, and I said, I went to college — “
“UCLA,” Carney helped out.
“That’s right — University of the Corner of Lenox Avenue!” The old joke.
This is Ray’s community and neighborhood. We take in the people, sights, and sounds of Harlem from his point of view, from chapter to chapter, from year to year. Whitehead has created a character who exemplifies the classic heist anti-hero while also giving the reader a penetrating look into a Black man’s life in Harlem in the 1960s and the circumstances he might not be able to avoid. No matter how much trouble he finds, we can’t help but root for Ray Carney every step of the way.
I really enjoyed this book and I strongly recommend it. You will enjoy it!
Let me say at the outset that the title of this book is a bit of irony. There is nothing brief about this book – the hardback version is about 700 pages. I haven’t counted but I think there might be seven killings in the first fifty pages.
It’s a busy book. Characters include the would-be assassins, various gang bosses, journalists and CIA officers. There’s the ghost of a politician, and an even more ghostly Bob Marley, referred to throughout the book simply as “The Singer.” Basically it’s one life after another impacted by violence, music and politics. All of them stuffed, and I do mean stuffed, into a novel of 700 or so pages, told from over a dozen viewpoints, over the course of 30-odd years.
The first part of the book revolves around the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in 1976. The second part of the book is based in part on the real-life story of the Shower Posse, who began their rise in early-’60s Kingston and spread to America, where, by the 1980s, they controlled much of the crack trade in New York and Miami — in the book, they form an alliance with Griselda Blanco of the Medellín cartel.
The beginning of the book goes back to when Edward Seaga and the Jamaican Labor Party used the gangs as enforcers in the slums of Tivoli Garden and the rival party, the People’s National Party led my Michael Manley.
This turf war led to spiraling poverty and savage violence. It was the kind of trauma described and transmuted into song by the great Bob Marley (referred to in the novel as the Singer), who in 1976, amid unprecedented bloodshed, announced a free concert to promote peace in Kingston. (Marley was himself caught between the J.L.P. and P.N.P., along with their criminal gangs.) At the same time, outside forces including the C.I.A., anti-Castro Cubans and the Colombian drug cartels were converging on Jamaica with money and guns. All of these characters appear in the book.
It’s a tricky book to read. Each chapter is narrated by a different character. There is a lot of violence and savagery, we are talking about slums here and people encouraged by outside forces to be violent to each other. Not all of the characters are likeable. But it’s a story of people on the wrong side of history and maybe doing the best they can. It’s a long book, but a good one and a dark look at some of the effects of colonialism.
Give it a try. I should mention that it won the Man Booker Prize – not too shabby.
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