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.
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