With two Pulitzer prizes for fiction under his belt, it’s not surprising when Colson Whitehead writes a character for the ages, but beleaguered everyman Ray Carney is a standout even for Whitehead. “Living taught you that you didn’t have to live the way you’d been taught to live,” says Carney, a young Black man who’s barely making ends meet in his Harlem furniture store while dreaming of more. The pressure’s on, too: his parents-in-law think their daughter could have done better, and Carney longs to be admitted to his father in law’s “paper-bag club,” but with skin darker than said brown bag, he’s not allowed. Loyalty to his own family leads Ray to help his cousin Freddy; always sketchy, Freddy convinces Carney to help him in a can’t-go-wrong robbery scheme that, yes, goes wrong, starting Carney on a heartbreaking trajectory. This character’s relentless efforts to make good in a world that expects and revels in his failure will remind readers of Jean Valjean in Les Miserables. Shadowing Colson’s terrific crime tale are the final throes of Jim Crow and the claw-your-way-up culture of early 1960s Harlem, but most of all, Carney will grab readers’ hearts and stay with them.
