PanHarpersAs Whitehead returns to the criminal-as-detective thriller genre with this sequel to Harlem Shuffle, it may be time to start asking whether he’s shorting his considerable skill to appeal to a wide audience ... I found myself wondering, was this black culture, \'keeping it real,\' earned in the only way that matters, which is to say sweating it out with other downtrodden blacks, unmindful of reward? Or was it something else? ... What are the forces that make sense of the churning sequences, and to what place does the writer of note deliver his audience? What’s the juice of this squeeze? By its nature the genre convention delivers lovable punch lines ... Give the people what they want, true. But knowing what we know, laughing when we are primed to and nodding our heads in unison corresponds tidily to the blown-out brownstone with the Elizabeth Roberts glass wall: We are entertained and informed and still bent on making it in New York. That’s the Crooklyn that makes us all a crook. Whitehead’s book does have glimmers of promise, of something irreducible to the social, the reason you read a novel instead of a pamphlet on segregation. But the resolution, connected to a gauzy nostalgia, is yet another aspect of the inevitable limit, the containment of genre fiction. The book’s wisdom operates in hindsight.
Percival Everett
PositiveBookPost\"The novel’s implicit promise of thoughtful entertainment is perhaps ironicized to the point of imperceptibility, but Everett does seem to have the handle on the joke of blackness in the face of white supremacy ... The hero of abstraction, \'nerdy and Aspergery and awkward and brilliant,\' is cheekily insightful when it comes to propositions of honesty (with one exception), but the plot of Dr. No assures us that at its mountainous, galactic conclusion, nothing does really, really matter.\
