Harlem Shuffle

Up to now I had read only one of Colson Whitehead's novels: The Intuitionist, his debut. I found that book ambitious but contrived, a flawed first try; somehow I had not sampled another until his latest, Harlem Shuffle. Harlem Shuffle is a pretty straight-ahead literary crime novel, set between 1959 and 1964 in– good guess!– Harlem and environs. The crime genre imposes its own set of rules on storytelling, and Whitehead embraces the discipline with gusto.

Our hero is Ray Carney, who owns a successful furniture store catering to the growing if tenuous postwar Black middle class. Despite having grown up around crooks, including his truly bad-guy father, Carney runs a legitimate business– well, mostly legit, at least most of the time, at least in the beginning. As often happens in such books, one thing leads to another, and Carney finds it increasingly difficult to escape his criminal connections and relations– especially his trouble-making cousin Freddie– not to mention the demands of his own ambition as a "striver." The story is deftly told, the main characters are vividly drawn, and the writing is first-rate. 

Whitehead is particularly good on the everyday corruption of life in the city. Even as an upstanding businessman, Carney is forced to count various payoffs as a cost of doing business: an envelope for the beat cop, an envelope for mob protection. Most galling, and consequential, is the envelope for the Harlem banker to ease Carney's way into membership of the Black elite's Dumas Club. Corruption and criminality are baked into the Manhattan economy for Blacks and whites alike, so fencing a few items of questionable provenance is less a matter of crossing a line than a choice of product lines and assessing risk vs. return. 

If you are a regular reader of crime fiction, Harlem Shuffle's characters and themes will call to mind the recent crop of excellent historically informed crime and suspense novels about complex Black characters struggling to keep their moral compass while navigating the waters of racist America– novels written by such "genre" writers as Walter Mosley, of course, and more recently Attica Locke and S.A. Cosby. It's no insult to be listed in that company. Although Colson Whitehead is renowned as a writer of "serious" literature, and I'm eager to explore more of his contributions there, if there's a sequel to Harlem Shuffle, I'm on it.

Bir Başkadır

Bir Başkadır, a title that someone at Netflix somehow decided to translate as Ethos (?!), is the best TV show I have seen in a long time. The Netflix site's capsulized description is: "A group of individuals in Istanbul transcend sociocultural boundaries and find connection as their fears and wishes intertwine." Fair enough. And Citizen Kane was about a boy and his sled.

For me Bir Başkadır brought to mind the works of great directors of family-based dramas like Ozu and Farhadi; the Farhadi connection is particularly apt given Bir Başkadır's explorations of gender and family dynamics in the context of a nominally Muslim society roiled by tensions between traditional/religious and modern/secular. Like Farhadi, the show's creator Berkun Oya uses the sociological backdrop to explore individual psychology and universal human themes. 

Oya has his own cinematic language. The show is built on dialogues, in the quite literal sense of two people talking. Each episode is constructed as a network of dyads: We sit in the room as A talks with B, then maybe B with C, and A with C, and B with D, etc. The camera focuses on the faces, almost always one at a time, in close-up. As they speak we ponder, are they talking with the other, or at the other, or to themselves, or against themselves? Some of the dialogues involve psychiatrists/ analysts... but who is analyzing whom, and which direction is the transference going?

As the old cliché would have it, the eyes are the windows of the soul, and Bir Başkadır certainly draws your attention to the eyes of its talking heads. But the camera also ranges around outside, whether downtown, or in the suburbs or countryside, and Oya finds beauty and mystery in the actual windows of the homes and vehicles in which his characters live and interact. 

In all of this Oya is assisted by an outstanding cast– most of all by Öykü Karayel, who plays the central character Meryem, a housekeeper living with her angry, frustrated, and not very bright brother and his damaged, possibly suicidal wife. All the dyads connect to Meryem, within one or two degrees of separation. Meryem is observant in more ways than one, and she is clever and funny. Karayel's eyes blaze, and her lips are plastic enough to express wonder, sadness, disdain, and ironic amusement within a span of moments. 

If I have a criticism, it is that the music can be obtrusive at times. But you know where the volume control is, and you will probably be reading the subtitles rather than following the talking anyway. 

Wisdom from Zeynep

"What if better is worse? Well, you know what? Better is almost never worse." It's painful to read her litany of Biden failures and own-goals in the fight against covid, but she seems to be right. Too bad the political alternative is an insane death cult. 

Whither inflation?

Today's New York Times headline and graph bugged me– nothing new there. The headline inflation number for December is 7.1%, which is calculated comparing prices (CPI) to December a year ago. Given the volatility of monthly inflation rates, smoothing by cumulating over 12 months of changes is not necessarily a bad idea, but it can give a very misleading idea of what inflation is doing right now. For example, if inflation had come to a screeching halt, and between November and December prices had not increased at all, the headline number compared to a year ago would still be about 6.5%, which looks pretty bad compared to the recent past. In fact, inflation for the month of December was still significant and concerning, running at over 5% annually, but it shows some evidence of having peaked. Kevin Drum has a nice graph illustrating this, which I reproduce below (see the blue line for monthly changes). I don't have a strong opinion about what will happen with inflation in the coming months, but the way the Times frames the numbers is alarmist and feeds a gloomy narrative that is not needed or warranted right now. [Addendum: More detail from Menzie Chinn]

First-person narrators – unreliable, delusional, or just plain bad

It seems as if almost all the novels I read these days are narrated in the first person by flawed characters whose motives, morals, perceptions, or grip on reality are seriously subject to question. These narrators are out to manipulate you, the reader, even as they delude themselves. You get to see their world through their eyes, but sometimes you get to see right through them to what they want to conceal or are themselves unwilling to acknowledge. That's an effect that can really only be achieved in literature.

The Good Soldier
Ford Madox Ford

This is considered the archetype in the genre of unreliable narrator novels, and its reputation is deserved, although the characters are pretty consistently unlikeable and unsympathetic– especially its very unreliable narrator, John Dowell. I'm not sure I can recommend it.

Good Behaviour
Molly Keane

Good Behaviour is a dark comedy in the grand tradition of novels about aristocratic families in decline, living off their creditors and the loyalty– or desperation– of the help, whose wages are chronically in arrears. Because the story begins at the end, it's not really a spoiler to say that the novel opens with our narrator Aroon St. Charles having just murdered (maybe!) her mother with (hmm) rabbit quenelles. The rest of the book fills in the back story. Aroon appears to be a blend of deep cynicism and piteous self-deception. I'm not sure the two are compatible, which leads me to believe that Aroon may be having us on about the self-deception. In that case she is even more cynical than I thought. Read it and tell me what you think.

A Pale View of Hills
Kazuo Ishiguro

Ishiguro's first novel is one of his very best, chilling and dreamlike, a ghost story of sorts. I plan to read it again soon and report back.

Bina: A Novel in Warnings
Anakana Schofield

This extraordinary novel– or is it a book-length poem?– deserves its own blog post. And its narrator, Bina, is deserving of better adjectives than "unreliable, delusional, or just plain bad." She's angry, confused and possibly suffering from incipient dementia, virtuous, and utterly delightful... anything but unreliable. More coming soon.

Audie Cornish

Working from home and driving rather little these days, I have not been listening to NPR nearly as much as I was two years ago. I haven't missed it much, largely because the hosts of the news shows I listened to, particularly "All Things Considered," had become nearly insufferable to me: breathless or sing-songy delivery, hearts on their sleeves when the news was bad, fawning in interviews with their personal faves, an annoying habit of repeating back what was just said in an interview, treating the audience as if we were children, or not paying attention: "Vaccination rates are 70% in X-land and only 50% in Y-land..." "Oh, so you're saying vaccination rates are actually higher in X-land?!"

Audie Cornish was always a welcome exception. Smart, professional, no-nonsense reporting. Treating the listeners like grown-ups, letting the story speak for itself. She'll be missed.