It’s not just crime fiction at its craftiest, but shrewdly rendered social history.
Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Whitehead continues his boisterous, incisive saga of late-20th-century Harlem and of a furniture dealer barely keeping his criminal side at bay.
The adventures of entrepreneur, family man, and sometime fence Ray Carney, which began with Harlem Shuffle (2021), are carried from the Black Citadel's harried-but-hopeful 1960s of that book to the dismal-and-divided '70s shown here. In the first of three parts, it’s 1971, and Carney’s business is growing even amid the city’s Nixon-era doldrums and the rise of warring militant groups like the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army. Carney barely thinks about sliding back into his more illicit vocation until his teenage daughter, May, starts hankering to see the Jackson 5 perform at Madison Square Garden. And so he decides to look up an old contact named Munson, a seriously bent White NYPD officer and “accomplished fixer,” who agrees to get free “up close” seats for the concert if Carney will fence stolen jewelry stuffed in a paper bag. But the job carries far more physical peril than advertised, culminating in a long night’s journey into day with Carney getting beaten, robbed, and strong-armed into becoming Munson’s reluctant, mostly passive partner in the cop’s wanton rampage throughout the city. In the second part, it’s 1973, and Pepper, Carney’s strong, silent confidant and all-purpose tough guy, is recruited to work security on the set of a blaxploitation epic whose female lead inexplicably goes missing. The third and final part takes place in the bicentennial year of 1976, the nadir of the city’s fiscal crisis, marked by widespread fires in vacant buildings in Harlem and elsewhere in New York’s poorer neighborhoods. When an 11-year-old boy is seriously injured by a seemingly random firebombing, Carney is moved to ask himself, “What kind of man torches a building with people inside?” He resolves to find out with Pepper’s help. What recurs in each of these episodes are vivid depictions of hustlers of varied races and social strata, whether old-hand thieves, crass showbiz types, remorseless killers, or slick politicians on the make with the business elite. Whitehead’s gift for sudden, often grotesque eruptions of violence is omnipresent, so much so that you almost feel squeamish to recognize this book for the accomplished, streamlined, and darkly funny comedy of manners it is. If its spirits aren’t quite as buoyant as those of Harlem Shuffle, it’s because the era it chronicles was depressed in more ways than one. Assuming Whitehead continues chronicling Ray Carney’s life and times, things should perk up, or amp up, for the 1980s.
It’s not just crime fiction at its craftiest, but shrewdly rendered social history.Pub Date: July 18, 2023
ISBN: 9780385545150
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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