Harlem Shuffle
2021 • 336 pages
Ratings50
Average rating3.6
15
Ratings50
Average rating3.6
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, this gloriously entertaining novel is “fast-paced, keen-eyed and very funny ... about race, power and the history of Harlem all disguised as a thrill-ride crime novel" (San Francisco Chronicle). "Ray Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked..." To his customers and neighbors on 125th street, Carney is an upstanding salesman of reasonably priced furniture, making a decent life for himself and his family. He and his wife Elizabeth are expecting their second child, and if her parents on Striver's Row don't approve of him or their cramped apartment across from the subway tracks, it's still home. Few people know he descends from a line of uptown hoods and crooks, and that his façade of normalcy has more than a few cracks in it. Cracks that are getting bigger all the time. Cash is tight, especially with all those installment-plan sofas, so if his cousin Freddie occasionally drops off the odd ring or necklace, Ray doesn't ask where it comes from. He knows a discreet jeweler downtown who doesn't ask questions, either. Then Freddie falls in with a crew who plan to rob the Hotel Theresa—the "Waldorf of Harlem"—and volunteers Ray's services as the fence. The heist doesn't go as planned; they rarely do. Now Ray has a new clientele, one made up of shady cops, vicious local gangsters, two-bit pornographers, and other assorted Harlem lowlifes. Thus begins the internal tussle between Ray the striver and Ray the crook. As Ray navigates this double life, he begins to see who actually pulls the strings in Harlem. Can Ray avoid getting killed, save his cousin, and grab his share of the big score, all while maintaining his reputation as the go-to source for all your quality home furniture needs? Harlem Shuffle's ingenious story plays out in a beautifully recreated New York City of the early 1960s. It's a family saga masquerading as a crime novel, a hilarious morality play, a social novel about race and power, and ultimately a love letter to Harlem. But mostly, it's a joy to read, another dazzling novel from the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning Colson Whitehead.
Featured Series
2 primary booksRay Carney is a 2-book series with 2 primary works first released in 2021 with contributions by Colson Whitehead.
Reviews with the most likes.
Loved this one. It's a great dip into a stylized harlem of a particular historic moment.
Plusses:
+ Great noir-ish dialogue, plot and characters.
+ A complex (but not that complex) protagonist.
+ Steeped in race relations of the time, but informative of present-day racism.
+ That plot! So fun.
+ Really fun structure, too, which jumps ahead just a bit, several times.
+ the character Pepper.
Minuses:
- zero well-fleshed out female characters. Would have added to the novel to involve the protagonist's wife's life more, for instance.
- needed more Pepper.
- had the novel-as-a-pre-screenplay feel. This isn't always a negative, but it did drag this one down a little for me. (That said, I'd see this movie.)
Episodic in nature, this is a book that reads a lot like a TV show. In that way, it's entertaining: Ray Carney, the protagonist, is a furniture salesman trying to make his way as a business owner with a young family in 1960's Harlem. While Carney is sympathetic, he's not entirely straight – though not entirely crooked, either. He's “bent,” as it calls out in the first line of the book.
The book is divided into 3 sections, and each section revolves around a different criminal plot in which Carney happens to find himself as a key player. The plot takes on similar shapes as other hijinks-crime narratives, but with the historical backdrop of NYC at a pivotal time in history for black Americans. The author does an excellent job of capturing the vernacular of the time, and all throughout the tone hits just right. However, as is my complaint with the other Whitehead book I read, it's too plot-driven for my tastes, too surface-level. I found myself fighting not to skim certain sections and I never got excited to pick it up again, even I did mostly enjoy it while reading. Having lived in Harlem right in the center of where the action takes place, I did enjoy reading about the neighborhood as it was 60 years back – had it not been for my personal experience there, this would be a 2.5 star book. It's not bad, it's just not my thing.
