Harlem Shuffle and Real Estate
Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead is a heist novel. But heist stories are not my thing, so I’m billing this as a novel about real estate. Because it partly is. And because I read it in tandem with Real Estate, the third installment of Deborah Levy’s “A Living Autobiography” series.
And we all know that “real estate” means more than a piece of property.
Carney, Harlem Shuffle’s protagonist, is the proprietor of a furniture store…that sometimes peddles in stolen goods proffered by his cousin Freddie. “There was a natural flow of goods in and out and through people’s lives, from here to there, a churn of property, and Ray Carney facilitated that churn.” “A churn of property”…I just love that phrase. We use, we inhabit, we upgrade, we downgrade. Does Carney want to make an upgrade to Strivers Row? Maybe.
And Levy, who pines for a home that she “could not place … geographically, nor did [she] know how to achieve such a spectacular house with [her] precarious income. All the same, [she] added it to [her] imagined property portfolio, along with a few other imagined minor properties.” Yet even if she doesn’t own where she lives, Levy says this: “I mean it was not my real estate, I did not own it, I was renting it, but I owned its mood.”
Where we live represents something, whether or not we like it.
I love thinking about property — not so much from a design sense, but from the flow of people that “churns” through. But it’s not just the actual structure. How and why neighborhoods shift, population patterns, migration trends: I ruminate on all of it, even if the reasons why things happen aren’t always “good.”
Last week, as I read both books, The Boston Globe contained all of these headlines in the same issue:
“UN says number of displaced worldwide now tops 84 million”
“Belarus, Poland mired in border crisis”
“Many fewer Haitians trying to enter US”
The “churn” has gone on forever.
I thought 2021 was the year that I finally revisited a project I started in Ireland that circles all of the above. But 2021 has turned out to be bananas.
So thank you Colson Whitehead, Deborah Levy, and The Boston Globe for providing me the sign that maybe 2022 is the year to dig in.
originally published on instagram