HARLEM SHUFFLE (2021)
By Colson Whitehead
Doubleday, 336 Pages.
★★★
RAZORBLADE TEARS (2021)
By S. A. Crosby
Flatiron Books, 326 pages.
★★★★
Here’s a tale of two books, one of which is written by Colson Whitehead, one of the great writers of our time; the other by S. A. Crosby, who is best known for gritty crime novels. In this case, though, it pays to know your genre. Both books develop strong central characters and are excellent reads, but the prize goes to Crosby for sticking with what he knows.
Whitehead’s tragic hero is Ray Carney, who he follows from 1959-64. He is an African American furniture store owner striving for respectability, though he does a bit of small-time fencing on the side. Everyone, it seems, has racket of some sort going in Harlem, so why not? Ray’s flaw lies in assuming he’s playing two equal halves against the middle, but he also assumes the halves are the same size. This puts him in a limbo in which he's too small to be the player he’d desperately like to be, but too decent to be a thug like his cousin Freddie. Harlem Shuffle is about who cons who, who has to follow the rules and who doesn’t, who has dreams and who has power, and the consequences of being on the wrong side at a given moment in time. Plot devices involve stolen jewels, dope peddling, cops on the take, the fragility of Black/White alliances, rival crime gangs, the 1964 Bedford-Stuyvesant riots, and how some cons transcend race. Can Ray survive games bigger than he? What about his marriage and his two children? Can he save Freddie?
Harlem Shuffle has echoes of Do the Right Thing and Whitehead is good on that score. He’s also superb at capturing the cusp-of-the-counterculture zeitgeist. It’s when he shifts into caper mode that the book loses steam, though even then Whitehead has his moments. Those moments are inconsistent, however, because caper crime isn’t his métier. When he goes there, he invites comparison to those who specialize in such works. Whitehead is a always better than middle of the pack, but his mistake is like Carney’s in thinking he can straddle the two halves. This makes Harlem Shuffle a good book, but not his best work. That’s another problem; when you set the bar as high as Whitehead has, we expect more than middling.
Razorblade Tears covers some of the same turf, albeit under different circumstances. Ike and Mya Randolph are grieving over Isiah [sic], their dead 27-year-old son who was murdered, along with his White husband, Derek. They are also raising their son’s daughter Arianna (via a surrogate). In this story, Ike is the man with middle-class pretensions. Though he got into trouble when younger, he now owns a landscape business and so disapproved of his son’s lifestyle that he refused to accept it. (Mya works in a hospital and embraced both young men.) Ike’s world is rocked when he finds racist and homophobic slogans sprayed on the boys’ vandalized graves.
Like it or not—and he doesn’t—Ike’s world collides with that of Buddy Lee Jenkins, Derek’s father. Ike recognizes Buddy immediately as poor White trash, plus his self-inflicted tattoos betray that Jenkins is also an ex-con. In his search for revenge Ike wants no part of Buddy and decides to go it alone. But when he finds the situation is bigger than he imagined, he and Buddy become unlikely partners who do battle with a motorcycle gang and some very, very nasty White nationalists into guns, running meth, and prepping for the coming war against people of color. Like the Ku Klux Klan, they’re not fond of gays either.
Buddy is essentially a gung-ho cowboy, but the tight-as-a-drum Ike isn’t much better. Ike doesn’t hesitate to rough-up a bunch of hipsters reluctant to say anything about Derek at the bakery where he worked or pick a fight in a gay bar. Once again families are at risk when violence comes to their respective doors.
Those squeamish about body counts probably ought to avoid this book. The biggest difference between Crosby’s approach and Whitehead’s is that, as a crime writer, neither Crosby nor his characters pull punches or hesitate to spill blood. To reiterate, Crosby is grittier than Whitehead and unafraid to wend his way to a darker ending. Crosby is, however, open to charges of trying too hard to be too contemporary by ticking PC boxes—there’s also a transgender character—but I found his straight-forward and less elegiac approach more appropriate for the genre.
Rob Weir
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