![]() Page by page, the prose is beautifully engineered. ![]() Whitehead’s breakthrough hit, The Underground Railroad (2016), offers a case in point. But his books don’t really do pathos they do ‘pathos’ (more marvellous sentences). ![]() His stories are meant to involve you, to evoke pathos and narrative tension, to present memorable characters. But this isn’t really what Whitehead is doing. And there are sound aesthetic reasons to write the sort of prose that enforces critical distance from the story being told. Plenty of writers want to stun you into admiration, of course, and don’t especially care about the story. Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead (Hachette, £16. The times they are a-changin’, but the more things change. In many ways, the 1960s could be the 2010s. All of which makes Harlem Shuffle a slightly uncanny reading experience. But they don’t make for easy involvement in the story. The particulars, yes, but not the problems. His control over assonance and his feeling for the internal structure of a paragraph bespeak both a finely tuned literary ear and a profound self-consciousness about the technical aspects of writing: imagery, pacing, telling detail. Set in the early 1960s, Harlem Shuffle is an extraordinary story about an ordinary man. His books are packed with densely worked phrases. Like any good pasticheur, he is really something of a prose virtuoso. ![]() C olson Whitehead is a playfully referential practitioner of genre pastiche. ![]()
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