COLSON WHITEHEAD'S HOME FURNISHING NOIR
I'm about to re-read of the novels 'Harlem Shuffle' and 'Crook Manifesto'
I spent a lot of the mid-to-late ‘70s on the streets of Harlem, USA. I interned at the black weekly, the Amsterdam News off 125th Street, did research at the Schomburg Library on 135th Street, and went to various nightclubs and armories watching jazz singers, funk bands, and disco DJs. It was neighborhood of derelict tenements, industrious residents, and unfinanced visionaries, some of who made a mark and others who never got their chance.
I walk those streets in my memory every time I read one of two novels Pulitzer Prize winner Colson Whitehead has published about that storied neighborhood — ‘Harlem Shuffle’ (2021) and ‘Crook Manifesto’ (2023), which chart the area’s history from 1959 and travel up to 1976. At the center of both books is Ray Carney, son of a vicious criminal who, on the surface, is a solid citizen with a thriving furniture business. But his father’s DNA, and criminal associations, haunt him. On the low Carney fences stolen goods, an endeavor that connects him to all levels of Harlem hustle. Aside for a taste for larceny, Carney also inherited from his father a criminal minded buddy known as Pepper.
In the two novels Whitehead documents the deals and deciptions of his main character, and the the decline of Harlem (along with New York City itself) over a decade an a half. Carney is our guide for most of the two volumes, while Pepper’s point of view takes control of a choice sesction of ‘Crook Manifesto.’ Of course, the real engine driving these narratives is Whitehead’s cynically humorous vision of big city life. One of the themes the author explores is that the legal and illegal worlds at are seperated by the thinest of threads, and that they mirror each other in ways the straight world doesn’t want to acknowledge.
“Churn,” Whitehead writes, “Carney’s word for the circulation of goods in his illicit sphere, the dance of TVs and diadems and toasters from one owner to the next, floating in and out of people’s lives on breezes and gusts of cash and criminal industry. But of course churn determined the straight world too, memorialized the lives of neighborhoods, businesses. The movement of shop owners in and out of 383 West 125th Street, the changing entities on the deeds downtown in the hall of records, the minuet of brands on the showroom floor.”
While I greatly admire several of Whitehead’s previous novels (‘The Underground Railroad’ in particular), I am a huge fan of big city crime narratives. These two books are not detective novels or crime procedurals. In fact the major cop in the book, white NYPD officer Munson, is a corrupt, murderous figure. I think of them as ‘home furnishing noir,’ because the lead character is a businessman who’s greatest passion seems to be the sail of sensible sofas. Carney is a man who lives by his wits, by leveraging relationships and staying out of the line of fire, while clinging to a veneer of respectibility.
Whitehead, who wrote a love letter to his beloved the metropolis (‘The Colossus of New York’) in 2003, captures the grime and toughness of that, now long gone city, with understanding and affection for its flaws. All good noir is as much about location as human characters and I recognize the streets, the dark corners and neon signage, of the city he poignently describes. Whitehead didn’t write these books just to tell a tawdry tale or two. Both novels speak to an ecosystem of business and personal relationships, high and low, that make my hometown attractive those with the fervor to take it on.
My former Village Voice colleague has one more books coming in his trilogy with the 1977 black out, angel dust, Mayor Ed Koch, Rupert Murdoch’s NY Post, early rap concerts and Jimmy Carter all imminent as ‘Crook Manifesto’ ends. I’m planning on re-reading both books this spring, while awaiting the final (or just next) installment.
Such fun books. I too could relate a few personal experiences with Colin's New York. His sense of flavor does just what it's supposed to do......put you THERE. Great to learn there's a third book coming.