![]() ![]() “Thousands and thousands toiling and plotting in their apartments and SROs and twenty-four-hour greasy spoons, waiting for the day when they will bring their plans into the daylight. “All over the city there were people like them, a whole mean army of schemers and nocturnal masterminds working their rackets,” Whitehead writes. 18, 2011 The zombie genre provides unlikely inspiration for the author’s creative renewal. The scheme that Carney engineers to wreak his revenge is entertaining, but it’s also a tragic example of how much energy is misdirected on internecine battles that are only furthering the work of a larger racist society. ZONE ONE by Colson Whitehead RELEASE DATE: Oct. Even as the neighborhood struggles against systemic abuses, the center of “Harlem Shuffle” focuses on a vendetta between Carney and a crooked Black banker. Clarke Award, the Hurston-Wright Award, and was longlisted for the Booker Prize. Carney’s own in-laws look down on him as a mere “rug-peddler,” and there’s a clear hierarchy of color among the Black residents. Colson Whitehead is the author eight novels and two works on non-fiction, including The Underground Railroad, which received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Carnegie Medal, the Heartland Prize, the Arthur C. ![]() But “Harlem Shuffle” is laced with intimations that classism and racism are conspiring to corrupt the city. ![]() The beautifully long, descriptive sentences are richly sensuous, and the languid plot is driven by characters rendered life-like through the author's choice of third-person omniscient narration. In a sense, we’re kept within the fertile biosphere of Carney’s cheery optimism, at least for a while. Zone One may not be Whitehead's finest novel, but it's a satisfying, riveting read. ![]()
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