HARLEM SHUFFLE by Colson Whitehead

Ray Carney is mostly an honest entrepreneur who owns a home furnishing store in Harlem in the early 1970s.  However, he does occasionally deal in stolen merchandise but only on a small scale, at least according to him.  However, his beloved cousin Freddie is a small-time crook and constant liability who sometimes involves Carney in his capers, with or without Carney’s consent.  Over the course of this novel, Freddie becomes involved in a burglary of a hotel’s safe deposit boxes, aligns himself with a drug dealer, and double-crosses a mobster.  Carney finds it tough to maintain his respectability as a businessman when he gets embroiled in Freddie’s various escapades, especially when the cops interrupt a meeting he has with a rep for a high-end furniture manufacturer.  Carney also engineers a caper of his own in order to get revenge against a banker who failed to deliver on a $500 bribe.  Although the writing is terrific, the pace of this novel is snail-like, despite the action-packed plot, not all of which I totally grasped.  The scene in the book that I can’t stop reading, because it is just too funny and vivid, takes place in a laundromat.  I won’t quote all the witticisms on pages 225-226, but these two sentences elicited a huge guffaw from me:

“The manager of the laundromat was a scrawny man in a saggy undershirt painted with sweat stains.  Launderer, heal thyself.”

I also learned about dorveille, or “dorvay” as Carney likes to spell it, which is a period of wakefulness between two half-cycles of sleep.  Apparently, centuries ago, people slept in two shorter shifts rather than in one continuous 8-hour stretch.  Makes sense to me, except for the going to bed at dusk, although during Daylight Saving Time that might work out OK.

BLACK LEOPARD, RED WOLF by Marlon James

Yikes, reading this book was a chore.  This book is The Lord of the Rings on steroids, or maybe testosterone, complete with a wicked enchanted forest, but not nearly as engrossing or entertaining.  Tracker plays the Strider role here but without the charisma, and the quest is the search for a mysterious boy.  Violence abounds, along with shape-shifting characters, including the Leopard in the title who transforms himself into a man and back again.  Characters morph into other characters, and their behavior and personalities fluctuate as well; they are sometimes good guys and sometimes bad.  And don’t even get me started on the women, who are all witches, sorceresses, or otherwise despicable creatures, such as hyenas.  There is quite a bit of perfunctory sex, sometimes consensual, sometimes not, but almost all of it takes place between male characters.  In fact, the only really likeable character is Sadogo, a big-hearted oaf with a murderous past.  The mingi are cursed children—albinos, conjoined twins, a boy with no limbs—whom Tracker tries to save from all the evil entities, and they are pretty cool as well.  However, all the misogyny aside, the choppy sentences, constant savagery, pronouns with ambiguous antecedents, the zigzagging timeline, and a vast cast of characters whose names vary and whose allegiances are fluid, make this novel very difficult to follow and even more difficult to enjoy.  I am totally mystified as to why this book has garnered so much praise.

HOW MUCH OF THESE HILLS IS GOLD by C Pam Zhang

The first part of this book reminded me so much of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.  Two orphaned children in the western U.S. are transporting their father’s rapidly decomposing body to an as yet undetermined burial place, as appendages drop off along the way.  They are abandoning their hardscrabble life in a mining community in the late 1800s for an uncertain future after Lucy fails to keep secret the family’s stash of gold bullion.  Lucy is twelve, and her sister Sam is nine, but partly due to their father’s urging after losing a newborn son, Sam(antha) passes as a boy.  Eventually, Lucy eschews life on the road, and their paths diverge, at least for a while, as both are looking for a place to call home.  The defining characteristic of these two kids is that they are Chinese-Americans, born in this country but forever treated differently because they look different.  Their quest for a sense of belonging is virtually unattainable, and their suffering, especially Lucy’s, has been augmented by physical abuse at the hands of their father after the loss of their mother.  We also learn the history of Lucy and Sam’s parents, and it is not pretty.  In fact, their story is so horrific, due to a catastrophe of their own making, that it’s a wonder they maintain any semblance of sanity afterward.  Although the pace of this novel definitely accelerates at about the halfway point, it still did not move me.  Plus, several stones in the plot are left unturned, such as whether Lucy finds out about her parents’ past, and we are left wondering about what happened to the kids’ mother.  I needed more closure on these two points, and the ending raises even more unanswered questions, so that the book feels unfinished. 

STILL LIFE by Sarah Winman

Love comes in many forms, as does family.  In this case, we have a family of unrelated people, mostly—mostly people and mostly unrelated.  A London bar serves as the gestation point for most of this family, but a move to Florence, Italy, for some of the characters causes the scope of this family to expand.  Ulysses Temper (and, yes, there is a minor character named Penelope) is the main character who moves to Italy with his ex-wife’s daughter, Alys.  Ulysses and Alys, also known as “kid,” are not related by blood, but his parental instincts are much stronger than those of Alys’s mother, Peg.  Peg is the character who disappointed me the most.  She is supposed to be beautiful and adored by all, but she does not generate any charisma on the page.  What’s to love about a mother who sends her seven-year-old daughter off to live in Italy, even if their relationship is problematic?  Peg eventually marries the abusive Ted, but her victimhood does not make her more appealing.  However, all of the other characters are very warm and fuzzy, including Claude, a parrot who manages to make an astute comment on many situations, and Cress, a lonely soul who finds romance late in life.  Granted, Claude’s remarks, along with Cress’s prognostications and a number of unlikely coincidences, cause the novel to dip into the realm of magical realism from time to time.  No matter.  This novel is largely an ode to Florence and to close friendships that transcend age and geographical proximity.  The lack of serious conflict among the cast of characters also verges on the improbable, but their bond is an illustration of what can be, if not necessarily what is.