Matt Snediker’s Reviews > Harlem Shuffle > Status Update

Coming back to this ahead of the publication of Cool Machine. I really did love Chester Himes’s COTTON COMES TO HARLEM, I thought it was phenomenally written for a piece of genre fiction, loved how insistently and smartly it tackled racial and class issues (if not gender politics)……………but this is a whole ‘nother thing, man. Colson Whitehead is 1 of 1. His prose is so… slippery, so clean, but so dense.

“Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked”

You’ve gotta be kidding me, man.

“Everyone who came uptown had crossed some kind of violent ocean.”

Whitehead has this knack for diabolically gorgeous punctuative sentences, tucked at the end of a descriptive passage, the power of which blows a heavy wind, upward, blows the reader’s head away from the book, creates a “wow, shit,” created a moment of reflection.

Two Pulitzers don’t come easy, all and all.