RaveBookforumEngrossing and shrewd ... Readers might wonder if they have been thrust into a speculative world where both small talk and genuine introspection have been abolished ... Binyam pushes into the surreal to reorient readers yet again around basic conceptions of home and family.
James Hannaham
PositiveBookforumMuch of the novel takes place in the twenty-four hours after Carlotta’s release, and its style, which abruptly toggles between free indirect discourse and unmediated access to Carlotta’s thoughts and speech without any punctuation to signal the switch, crackles with a deeply felt urgency as she tries to make sense of a new world that has been so quickly built upon the old one ... Given this synopsis, one might expect a gentrification novel, a prison novel, a trans novel, or simply an imitation of Joyce. Hannaham manages to avoid these generic conventions—for better and sometimes for worse—by exceeding them. To read Hannaham, a Black queer writer himself, is to encounter and explore a mind that takes irreverence seriously ... Brusquely funny and subtly devastating, the novel is often quite playful even as it’s levying shrewd critiques of evils ranging from mass incarceration to being misgendered...Even so, as Black trans aesthetics continue to largely be forged through poetics, visual art, and memoir rather than fiction, to ask one day in the life of Carlotta Mercedes to make significant inroads in the representation of Black trans life might be one thing too much to ask of a novel with so many weighty concerns ... Hannaham, though cis, certainly bucks tradition by rendering his protagonist as a complicated human rather than a stereotype. This is admirable but a tension similar to the one Barbara Smith locates in the difference between living as a lesbian and writing within lesbianism arises in representations of trans experience written by cis authors. There might be no satisfying resolution to this conundrum yet, but, before a Black trans novel tradition has been firmly established, the Carlottas that we are given might finally force more of us to actually give a shit about them.
Paulo Scott, tr. Daniel Hahn
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review[A] rather brisk novel that punctures the country’s fantasy of being a post-racial state and leaves readers scrambling for a sense of closure that it cannot possibly provide ... This longue durée of anti-Blackness plays out with a chaotic energy reflected both in the novel’s form and in the structure of its sentences. The propulsive style of Scott’s novel Nowhere People returns; in Daniel Hahn’s translation, sentences collapse into one another via comma splices, as if there were little time for full stops ... Phenotypes underscores how difficult antiracist projects can be at any scale ... As these matters mesh with socioeconomic inequality, police brutality, interpersonal violence and state surveillance, Scott’s characters quickly abandon the possibility of a comprehensive solution in favor of stopgap measures that may or may not work. Such are the inadequacies, the novel asserts, of treating entrenched and systemic issues as if they are only skin-deep.
Colson Whitehead
PositiveBookforumThere is violence and grimness, to be sure, but they are undercut here by the drollness and irony that is emblematic of Whitehead’s earlier works, qualities that he could not readily avail himself of in his two previous books’ representations of enslavement and the institutional abuse of children. There’s an unmistakable wryness to much of the dialogue ... The prose glistens most dazzlingly as Carney peregrinates around the neighborhood ... The conviviality of Harlem, brimming with life and sin of all kinds, produces characters who are almost too human—that is, complex and contradictory in the most mundane but familiar ways ... If crime novels of the early- and mid-twentieth century often provided a glimpse inside the psychology of the criminal, Harlem Shuffle evinces how such a psychology could come into vogue ... By making the novel’s protagonist a self-described entrepreneur who unyieldingly rails against the lawless behavior he so regularly partakes in, Whitehead reveals how structural racism, interpersonal anti-Blackness, and the fantasy of the American dream co-conspire under capitalism, undermining Black community by atomizing success into an individual aspiration and achievement rather than a collective possibility.
