HARLEM SHUFFLE by Colson Whitehead

SAVAGE TONGUES

Van der Vliet Oloomi, Azareen Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (288 pp.) $24.00 | Aug. 3, 2021 978-0-358-31506-3

A woman travels to Spain to confront her traumatic past. Arezu is 17 when she has an affair with Omar, her stepmother’s nephew. Affair is too strong a word; Omar is 40 years old, and Arezu doesn’t so much consent as she is compelled into a relationship with him. Twenty years later, she’s still trying to sort things out. That’s where Van der Vliet Oloomi’s latest novel picks up. Arezu returns to Spain to try to confront, or at least contend with, her past—and the lingering effects it has had on her life. “How does one document in language an experience of pain so totalizing that it refuses the fixed nature of words altogether?” she asks. Van der Vliet Oloomi’s strategy is to forgo plot—and most of the other conventions of fiction—in favor of a book-length monologue. Arezu considers not only her own past, but, more generally, racism, colonialism (her mother is Iranian, her father British), and Israeli-Palestinian politics—Arezu’s Israeli best friend joins her on her trip— among other things. The result can feel oddly claustrophobic, even solipsistic, as Arezu sorts through the seemingly infinite gradations of her feelings. The novel breathes when Arezu manages to step outside herself, to describe her brother, for instance, who was once beaten in a racist attack, or her friend, Ellie, who comes with her to Spain. Arezu’s trauma is real, but there is something self-indulgent about the way she turns the memories over and over in her mind. She seems to savor her own pain in a way that the author doesn’t seem fully aware of.

An intense but ultimately claustrophobic book in which a woman can’t get outside her own mind.

AWAKE

Voetmann, Harald Trans. by Ottosen, Johanne Sorgenfri New Directions (112 pp.) $14.95 paper | Sep. 7, 2021 978-0-8112-3081-0

This strange novella concerns Pliny the Elder and his drive to catalog all of nature. Pliny the Elder, a Roman writer and military man, is famous for his encyclopedic Naturalis Historia and for perishing when Vesuvius erupted in 79 C.E. Voetmann, a Danish writer and translator of classical Latin works, has written a trilogy that begins with this volume, his first book in English, and continues with one on Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe and one on the 11th-century German mystic Othlo of St. Emmerman. Not beach reads, perhaps. This novel is loosely constructed with brief citations from the Historia, vignettes and observations from Pliny’s life, and comments from his nephew, Pliny the Younger. The fluid prose owes much to translator Ottosen. One thematic thread is the contrast between the intellectual effort to rein in nature’s extraordinary variety and man’s ugly, ignorant cruelty. The great scholar himself is obese and prone to nosebleeds and dictates from a filthy bed. He has the feet of his servant Diocles nailed to a fig tree because he tried to escape. He describes dispassionately an arena entertainment in which the bellies of various pregnant animals and a woman are slit open before an elated audience. In lighter moments, Pliny gives a disastrous public reading. His nephew complains that his wife has replaced “a large portion of my library” with lurid romance novels. Diocles has several comic sections before he falls to screaming at the fig tree. And some of the knowledge Pliny the Elder professes is laughably off the mark to a 21st-century reader—as our own grand schemes may seem 2,000 years hence, if there is a hence.

An interesting work and a good introduction to this unusual writer.

HARLEM SHUFFLE

Whitehead, Colson Doubleday (336 pp.) $28.95 | Sep. 14, 2021 978-0-385-54513-6

After winning back-to-back Pulitzer Prizes for his previous two books, Whitehead lets fly with a typically crafty change-up: a crime novel set in mid-20thcentury Harlem. The twin triumphs of The Underground Railroad (2016) and The Nickel Boys (2019) may have led Whitehead’s fans to believe he would lean even harder on social justice themes in his next novel. But by now, it should be clear that this most eclectic of contemporary masters never repeats himself, and his new novel is as audacious, ingenious, and spellbinding as any of his previous period pieces. Its unlikely and appealing protagonist is Ray Carney, who, when the story begins in 1959, is expecting a second child with his wife, Elizabeth, while selling used furniture and appliances on Harlem’s storied, ever bustling 125th Street. Ray’s difficult childhood as a hoodlum’s son forced to all but raise himself makes him an exemplar of the self-made man to everybody but his upper-middle-class in-laws, aghast that their daughter and grandchildren live in a small apartment within earshot of the subway tracks. Try as he might, however, Ray can’t quite wrest free of his criminal roots. To help make ends meet as he struggles to grow his business, Ray takes covert trips downtown to sell lost or stolen jewelry, some of it coming through the dubious means of Ray’s ne’er-do-well cousin, Freddie, who’s been getting Ray into hot messes since they were kids. Freddie’s now involved in a scheme to rob the Hotel Theresa, the fabled “Waldorf of Harlem,” and he wants his cousin to fence whatever he and his unsavory, volatile cohorts take in. This caper, which goes wrong in several perilous ways, is only the first in a series of strenuous tests of character and resources Ray endures from the back end of the