Matt Snediker’s Reviews > Harlem Shuffle > Status Update

“They were cousins, mistaken for brothers by most of the world, but distinguished by many features of personality. Like common sense. Carney had it. Freddie’s common sense tended to fall out of a hole in his pocket.”

Entire worlds, lifetimes, novels in their own right, exist within Whitehead’s sentences, man. He’s so cool.

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.