Through Carney, Colson examines the plight of mid-century Black entrepreneurs, the endless struggle for power in New York City, the history of Harlem, and the vast spectrum of ideological grays separating law-abiding citizens and criminal masterminds.
Meanwhile, his dealings in business and in crime - he’s a fence, a reseller who acts as intermediary between thieves and interested buyers - congeal into a double life that he strains to conceal from his wife and her parents. Whitehead’s latest novel, Harlem Shuffle, which is out September 14, ponders the life of Ray Carney, a furniture salesman trying to grow his showroom and move his expanding family to safer lodging uptown. The inspiration comes by hook or by crook, from local news reports, essays, and Pinterest pages. He might write a zombie story set in a fictionalized metropolis resembling New York City ( Zone One), and he might publish a coming-of-age story about Suffolk County youth loosely based on his own time there ( Sag Harbor), and he might track abuse of Black teens in a Florida reform school ( The Nickel Boys). His wide-ranging interests have manifested in his novels, which shift wildly in tone and subject matter from one to the next without abandoning the hallmarks of the author’s storytelling: the intricate narratives, the colorful ensemble casts, the historical accuracy, and the grappling with social-justice and racial-power dynamics. The New York native and two-time Pulitzer winner is a history buff and pop-culture obsessive. The magnitude of this reversal of fate is not lost on Whitehead. (“To alter a little Ralph Ellison,” Whitehead’s 1993 review of rap group Digable Planets’ debut album Reachin’ begins, “jazz will make you, and jazz will unmake you.”) A little over two decades later, he’s preparing to attend the prime-time Emmy broadcast he used to write about for work, where the director Barry Jenkins and his beautiful, harrowing adaptation of Whitehead’s 2016 opus, The Underground Railroad - which follows a Georgia slave through a long, arduous trek toward freedom across a string of grisly scenes - are up for awards.
Before Colson Whitehead wrote his first novel - 1999’s The Intuitionist, a mystery following a Black elevator inspector - he was a music and television critic at The Village Voice.
0 kommentar(er)
