'The Nickel Boys The scariest juvie in history
Serial Killer The Underground Railroad, with a very high grade
Raymond Carney, the character in Colson Whitehead's The Harlem Beat (Random House), grows up in Harlem in the 1940s. His mother dies, his father is a criminal.
No one takes care of him, he eats poorly, he doesn't wash, he doesn't have decent clothes, the kids at the institute make fun of him.
He gets by as he can
.
He studies something, he's not a chump.
He gets a job in a furniture store, receives an unexpected and not quite clean inheritance and sets up his furniture store.
He marries a richer girl than him, a daughter of the black bourgeoisie of Harlem.
He is a good husband and a good father and he goes out of his way to get his business going, but he also has a double life as an
assistant
to the neighborhood mafias.
The thieves go to his store to
launder their loot
and he, who has the inner voice of a good, prudent and moral citizen, lets himself go and collects his percentage.
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Carney comes before readers in three acts.
In the first, in 1956, he is
an errand
for mobsters and is about to become their victim because of
an overly successful coup
that pits two gangs against each other.
he survives.
In the second, in 1958, he is already a somewhat successful businessman trying to enter the circles of Harlem's elites and who, to defend his interests and his pride, uses the mobsters who used him before.
When someone rips him off, Carney gives him a lesson.
And in the third, in 1964, he receives a visit from
his Ghost of Christmas Past.
in the form of a cousin who was his only childhood friend, who never got past a poor pick-pocketing thief and who has become the most wanted man in Manhattan due to a couple of linked calamities.
Colson tries to protect him
but never gets around to risking his status
on him.
The rhythm of Harlem is and is not a crime novel: it talks about the underworld, there is violence, drugs and hypocrisy and some archetypes of the genre are recognized.
But the intrigue matters little, a bit in the style of Andrea Camilleri's novels, and, almost at the end, there is a sentence that changes the meaning of the entire book:
"The black city and the white city: one superimposed on the other, ignoring each other, separated and connected by roads", reads page 331. And in that sentence, a fringe between paragraphs, perhaps lies the secret of the book, that perhaps
deals more with the city than with violence or even with races.
Colson Whitehead. JAVIER BARBANCHO
«The city as a literary theme excites me.
I have written a lot about the city, I have an essay called
The Colossus of New York
that deals with how to live in a big city.
And this book also does it in part, or rather talks about how the city changes.
The story begins and ends in the lower part, on the other side of Manhattan
.
It starts on a street that in 1956 was a kind of technology market, the place where televisions and radios were sold.
And it ends in that same place, which was razed to become the site of the World Trade Center.
We all know what happened to the World Trade Center 35 years later," explains Whitehead, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, thanks to
The Underground Railroad
(2017) and
The Nickel Boys
(2020).
«But it is also a novel based on the construction of a character.
People say in the United States that this is a book about race, but deep down, it is about much more: race, social class, how we present ourselves with masks to society, becoming an adult, family, power, psychology... From the city, of course.
It is all the factors that come together to build Carney's story that make the novel.
The first attraction of The Harlem Rhythm is hyper-realistic: Whitehead's novel is full of specific references: names of streets and subway lines, record stores, jewelry stores, restaurants, radio brands, and models. sofa, saxophonists and famous cabaret dancers.
Proper names and place names resonate like a New York opera by Kurt Weil or a jazz concert.
«Well, do you know what kind of music he listened to while writing?
contemporary punk.
I know that the novel is full of bebop, but I listened to rock ».
White music?
The Harlem Rhythm is also one of those novels that seems to be in dialogue with other texts.
At one point in the book, a white girl approaches Carney and gives him a pamphlet with instructions for assembling a Molotov cocktail.
Will she be the daughter of The Swede from Philip Roth's
American Pastoral
making a cameo in a novel?
The rhythm of Harlem is also similar to
Jonathan Lethem
's
The Fortress of Solitude
in how it portrays the tension between the city of whites and that of blacks, and
Middlesex
, by Eugenides, because it describes the race riots of 1964... To books? white?
How have white people been good at writing about racism?
«I have not read
American Pastoral
or
Middlesex
sorry.
I feel very close to Jonathan Lethem, we write from the same years, from the same space and from the same people, from very precise conflicts”, responds Whitehead.
Perhaps the peculiarity of this being the story of an African-American man is that
there are no idealizations
.
«Carney has a furniture store because the furniture well represents the desire to enter the middle class, to find stability in his relationship with the world.
How can I not see him with sympathy?
This belief that each move, each new apartment will be the change that will save the family from him is a New York obsession that I participate in.
Then he always ends in disappointment ».
Nor are there idealizations in the portrayal of the riots of the 60s. «Not all black people were in the protests.
Some worked 20 hour days to get by;
Others, many of my characters, were criminals who didn't care if Malcolm X or Doctor King was right.
Not for the black elites who despise Carney.
"All elites are the same, black or white.
They organize to continue being elites»
And how about Harlem in 2023?
Too much white, too rich?
“The main street is like any shopping street, with the same Nike and Apple stores.
It's the generic city but I don't think it's bad:
I like the city also with its boring parts
», says Whitehead.
“Look, I was born an optimist, I grew up after the years of the Civil Rights Movement and I thought that the world was going to consist of always moving in the right direction regarding racism.
We had a black president and I thought it was incredible.
Afterwards, we elected Donald Trump and felt a serious regression.
I think my children are going to have it better than me but I am not so sure that a certain path awaits them ».
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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