Matt Snediker’s Reviews > Harlem Shuffle > Status Update

Just so impossibly in love with this thing so far. The Michael Corleone-style “surrounded by crime all his life, has always kept his nose clean, but can’t resist the gravitational pull of That Life once the heat is on” arc that Carney’s slowly slipping into is so satisfying and Whitehead’s prose is really just incomparable. Simple but masterful. The Tim Duncan of writers.

Maybe the first person to ever compare Colson Whitehead to Kacey Musgraves but something I love about both of them is this employment of an effortless colloquialism, that feels at the same time a hundred years old and at the same time totally bespoke, brand new. Like it was from another,very similar dimension

“The traffic at that hour was nothing. King Kong come running down the street, there was no one to see.”

“They were cousins, mistaken for brothers by most of the world, but distinguished by many features of personality. Like common sense. Carney had it. Freddie’s common sense tended to fall out of a hole in his pocket.”

Entire worlds, lifetimes, novels in their own right, exist within Whitehead’s sentences, man. He’s so cool.

Coming back to this ahead of the publication of Cool Machine. I really did love Chester Himes’s COTTON COMES TO HARLEM, I thought it was phenomenally written for a piece of genre fiction, loved how insistently and smartly it tackled racial and class issues (if not gender politics)……………but this is a whole ‘nother thing, man. Colson Whitehead is 1 of 1. His prose is so… slippery, so clean, but so dense.

“Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked”

You’ve gotta be kidding me, man.