”Harlem Shuffle” by Colson Whitehead - short review

 “Harlem Shuffle” by Colson Whitehead:

Apart from being a social novel and a morality play about race and power Harlem Shuffle is also a crime novel, at least it follows the laws of crime novels. While the book failed to win me over I understand that for some the pleasure of the plot lies in discovering what kind of trouble an ordinary man can get into, and how or whether he’ll get out. 

Harlem Shuffle is set in the 1960s where we follow ordinary furniture salesman Ray Carney, basically a good guy who gets sucked into schemes and heists through his cousin, boyhood companion and best friend, Freddie.

The novel is structured in three sections. 

The first Act shows how easily a man can step downward into crime. 

In Act 2 we follow Carney’s climb up the echelons of criminal activity. For Carney it might feel like an advancement but it is just an illusion.

In Act 3 Carney is faced with questions of family ties and social responsibility and whether a man should step up to help others. Will Carney get his cousin Freddie out of trouble this time and will he do it regardless of what the costs will be for him. 

The prose is good, entertaining, the painting of New York accurate and atmospheric and a love-letter to a Harlem long gone-bye. The novel gains force through accumulation and acceleration all heavy with criminal activity. And yet it failed to convince me and that is not Whitehead’s fault but boils down to a matter of taste. 

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”Guapa” by Saleem Haddad - review

 “Guapa” by Saleem Haddad:

This is a is fluent, passionate and emotionally honest coming-of-age tale of a young gay Arab man named Rasa in the Middle East and his struggle for self-definition, mirroring the complex battles for self-determination being fought out in Arab societies. The political landscape is just post Arab-spring revolution with an overall feeling of despair and resignation.

it is set over the course of one day and we follow Rasa on his way through an unnamed Arab city in search of his identity, his lost love of his life, his family, his mother who has left when he was a young boy, his father who died some years ago of cancer. Rasa lives alone with his only remaining relative, his grandmother. Their flat is a shrine to Rasa’s dead father and a way of dismissing his vanished mother. The grandmother, Teta is an oppressing strong force, ruling the household, dominating the family life even when the father of Rasa was still living and the mother was still present. With her stubborn mind, rooted in the old ways, her head full of misgivings, prejudices, rules, restrictions, all founded on shame and the fear of what people will say. Even if to her she acts only in the interest of the family, she thereby drives the family apart. She is a personification of the old mind-set that rules the Arab world with its tight rules regarding family and conduct.

Rasa has lost his true love because his lover, Taymour who, even though he truly loves Rasa back, is also too weak to not bend to society’s rules and marries a woman for appearance sake, so betraying their love. Everyone is performing, in one way or other, everyone is putting on a mask and not showing their face. 

Rasa is torn between many conflics. He is queer in more than one way. He is gay in a male dominated society who disapproves of homosexuality. He is Arab, but a young Arab who fights the old ways because there is no future to be seen for the younger generation. He studies in the USA and there meets a girl who accuses him of being so Arab and and an American-Arab who accuses him of being too westernized. 

Family, identity, and politics collide in this honest, insightful novel. This is in many parts a very political novel and in some parts it feels like a young-adult coming-of-age novel. The main characters are approaching thirty, yet often acting like thirteen-year-old teenagers. Maybe this is a hint that until self-acceptance occurs and sexually based discrimination ends, development is arrested.

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“Babysitter “ by Joyce Carol Oates

 “Babysitter“ by Joyce Carol Oates:

This novel is a tale of violence and abuse of the most vulnerable, children and women, committed by cruel, dominating men. 

It is 1977, Detroit and the city is still recovering from the race riots a decade earlier but experiencing the first signs of urban gentrification. A series of brutal child murders by a perpetrator known as Babysitter hits, shocks and terrorizes the citizens. Babysitter leaves his victims lying naked, washed and groomed, on the ground, their clothes neatly folded beside them. 

In stark contrast and in a parallel story-line but serving as the main engine of the plot is the story of Hannah, a Dior-clad 39-year-old housewife, rich, with two little kids and a husband who is not aware of her anymore, living a secluded, boring life in which every day is a white blank that needs to be filled with activity, any activity. She is profoundly doubting herself, is deeply uncertain, despite her arresting beauty, about the reality of her social being. She embarks on a dangerous, devastating affair with a mysterious man known only by the initials YK. Even after YK rapes her in the most cruel and demeaning fashion, almost killing her in the event, Hannah, starved for love as she is, keeps thinking of him as her lover with tenderness. Hannah is victimized but, quite bafflingly also cooperates in her own victimization. “Only the weak fall in love, they see no way of living otherwise”. This is a fair summarization of the desires that drive Hannah in this disturbing novel. 

The narrative timeline twists back and forth and for much of the novel Hannah’s daydreams keep returning again and again to the sensation of YK touching her wrist at their initial meeting or her first ascent in the glass capsule of a hotel elevator which took her towards their first meeting. 

Interwoven throughout the narrative are simmering racial and class tensions. The wealthy white class citizens feeling threatened by the black populace of poorer Detroit, the Filipina household help who is constantly there, caring for the family, but never registered as part of it. 

This is a compelling, unsettling study of the most ugly aspects of human desire. It is dark, violent and a tense examination of gender and power. 

In the end, even though Oates is, as she is so often, brilliant in her writing, it proved to be unsatisfactory for me, I just couldn’t go the way Oates wanted me to go and believe that a woman like Hannah would be so foolish to not see the risk that lies in such a reckless, dangerous affair, with all the signs of “turn back” on glaringly red, and still go on, risk her and her family’s existence just because she was restless and sexually unfulfilled. 

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