Matt Snediker’s Reviews > Harlem Shuffle > Status Update

Sometimes ur like “wow Colson hasn’t done that thing where he stops me in my tracks at a certain line in a while” and then he goes:

One of the Zenith hi-fi shook crazy saxophone stuff from the Village.

Just, yknow, not a sentence that changes your life or anything, but one that is so insanely deceptively difficult, smartly crafted, all the rest of it. He’s so good at this stuff.

Maybe it’s bc I just finished Another Country by James Baldwin but I’m getting a lot of ‘Another Country’ (by James Baldwin) vibes from the Freddie character at this point in the book. Uptown-downtown vibe, falling on tough times, not visiting family, a few reefer episodes in Greenwich Village, bunking with a chill ass gay white boy. Just saying. The vibes are there.

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.

This is like the Fat City of crime novels. A novel about all the real, working class lives that revolve around the outer orbit of crime. A novel about what it’s like to be a real dude living in a place where crime is a language you’re semi-fluent in. North of “puedo ir al baño” but south of carrying on a full conversation. North of Chester Himes, south of James Baldwin, in terms of New York story tones.

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.”