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Doubleday, 2021

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Harlem Shuffle

By colson whitehead, reviewed by patrick lohier.

Colson Whitehead’s new novel,  Harlem Shuffle , is the epic and captivating story of Ray Carney—furniture salesman, family man, entrepreneur on the rise and a vivid, walking, breathing, living exemplar of that classic archetype, the striver. Harlem Shuffle is a bravura performance, an immersive, laugh-out-loud, riveting adventure whose narrative energy is boosted by its memorable hero and a highly relevant backdrop of social injustice.

Set from 1959 to 1964, the novel comprises three episodes charting the precarious rise of Carney, a self-made man who habitually dips and sometimes dives into New York’s criminal underworld. In his “straight” life, Carney is the owner and proprietor of Carney’s Furniture, which serves the neighborhood’s Black clientele by offering new and “gently used” furniture and appliances along with a forgiving policy on lines of credit. Many of Carney’s clients struggle financially and fear shopping in white-owned stores where they might be denied service or otherwise humiliated. Carney is also a tender husband to his supportive pregnant wife Elizabeth and father to their young daughter Mary. Elizabeth works for a travel agency that specializes in planning Green Book-style itineraries that help Black travelers navigate the treacherous highways and byways of the segregated 1950s and 60s. Then there’s his beloved cousin Freddie, a lovable crook who’s as close to a brother as anyone in Carney’s life, and whose “common sense” tends “to fall out of a hole in his pocket—he never carried it long.”

From the novel’s opening sentence (“His cousin Freddie brought him on the heist one hot night in early June”), Freddie draws Carney into shady dealings—moving stolen goods through a loose network of fences and pawnbrokers. That network includes Carney’s erstwhile mentor, Harvey Moskowitz, his main contact in Manhattan’s Diamond District. Carney is wary of the dangers, but his secret side hustle helps him pay the bills. His worries are understandable; that world destroyed his parents and made for a harrowing childhood. For Carney is the son of an infamous, long-deceased local hoodlum named Big Mike Carney, from whom he’s inherited a healthy sense of cunning. The turbulence of Carney’s childhood fuels his desire for the security and stability of the “straight” world.

When a job goes sideways, Carney gets taken for a ride by the formidable Pepper, a cold, calculating enforcer who happens to have been one of Big Mike Carney’s old cronies. Pepper is as enigmatic and charismatic a crook as any in modern fiction. His tentative, slow-burning partnership with Carney is one of the novel’s most engaging touches. Key to Whitehead’s accomplishment is his virtuosic handling of the distinct lingo and arcane codes of Carney’s various worlds. Pepper, especially, is portrayed with hard-boiled economy and delicious wit:

No one answered Pepper’s knock the first two times. “Yes?” “It’s Pepper. And Carney.” “Don’t know any Pepper. No salt, neither. You get on.” It wasn’t Miami Joe’s voice. This guy sounded like he’d read a book once. Pepper ran his finger along the door frame, testing, then kicked it in.

Fittingly, Carney’s family live along Harlem’s Striver’s Row. The Carney family’s street “was one of the most beautiful stretches in Harlem, but it was a little island—all it took was a stroll around the corner to remind its residents that they were among, not above.” Among what, you might ask? Among the “urban blight” and creeping disintegration that Carney sees hopping through Harlem “from place to place like bedbugs.”

The killing of a Black teenager named James Powell by a white police officer named Thomas Gilligan sets off riots in the summer of 1964. The backdrop of a real historical event amps the novel up from the compulsively readable to the profoundly topical. Among the defter touches is Whitehead’s empathetic portrayal of disparate reactions within the Black community to protests and riots. Carney sympathizes with the rage and feels its source in his soul, but he’s also pained by the destruction of local businesses. The blight, the cramped Striver’s Row apartment, the protests and unrest on the streets and other pressures stir Carney’s anxieties and aspirations. On solitary nighttime walks he stalks real estate along Riverside Drive and dreams of moving his growing family to roomier, more luxurious digs. Among Harlem Shuffle ’s many engaging pleasures is watching Carney bootstrap himself toward the urban American dream.

Carney has his own ideas about that ethical grey zone between the law-abiding and the criminal. As Whitehead writes, “Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked, in practice and ambition.” Because Carney grew up on the edges of Harlem’s turbulent underworld, he understands better than most the brutality and greed undergirding both the crooked and the straight worlds. In fact, he’s highly sensitized to all kinds of dualities: Black and white, rich and poor, uptown and downtown, straight and crooked. That hard-won knowledge helps him keep things in perspective. When considering his own neglected and hardscrabble childhood, he sets grievance aside with a survivor’s and striver’s assurance: “It had been hard. Others had it worse.”

Whitehead conveys the violence on the other side of civility especially well in the novel’s third act, when Carney goes toe-to-toe with the patriarch of a white political dynasty. While closing in on his dreams, a bit of overconfidence and an ironclad sense of loyalty put Carney and everyone he knows at risk. Pepper, sensing trouble, warns him, “Nothing solid in the city but the bedrock.” Despite Carney’s efforts to keep the crooked things from breaking him and the people he loves, the heat gets red hot, and a painful and dramatic reckoning crashes over him.

Even while using the law-abiding and criminal worlds as counterfoils, Whitehead shows how much they overlap in their shared desire for opportunity, security, safety, and a fair shake. His love for his characters and for the Harlem of Harlem Shuffle is clear. In this brilliant novel Whitehead has woven a rich tapestry with resonant characters and relationships, a playful, memorable lyricism, and a hero for the ages.

Published on December 7, 2021

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What Is Crime in a Country Built on It?

How Colson Whitehead subverts genre conventions in his new book

W hen I was 7 years old , I went with my friends to a nearby corner store after school. I remember the outing vividly—even the brands of chocolate-chip cookies I was torn between buying. Just when I had settled on Famous Amos, I felt a hard push, then heard the words “Get out! Get out!” We were stealing, the shop owner said. “Don’t come back!” Not long after, I recall being inside a stuffy car with my grandmother. We were on our way to one of the tax-free outlet malls in Delaware, but not to shop. When we arrived, my cousin was sitting on the edge of the pavement by the parking lot, waiting for us. “I swear she didn’t steal anything,” she said, crying, her head in her hands. My aunt was being held by the mall police for shoplifting.

People are sometimes asked, “When did you become aware of your race?” This was not that moment for me, though around this time, I certainly realized that my race marked me as a thief. I know I should be offended, but I have always found robbery glamorous: In a kind of defiance, I have preferred to associate theft with high-end getaway cars and wads of cash stuffed into suede jewelry pouches, soft to the touch. I imagined myself, and still do, in league with the slinky cat burglar Selina Kyle (also known as Catwoman), Audrey Hepburn in How to Steal a Million , and En Vogue on the Set It Off soundtrack. I am far from alone. Everywhere you turn, the world of thievery is inhabited by sleek and sexy heroines and dapper playboys who can pick locks and crack safes. Even Helen Mirren wants to be in a Fast and Furious movie.

Colson Whitehead, too, seems to have fallen for the seductive allure of the thief in his newest novel, Harlem Shuffle . When he sat down to work on it, he had just finished The Underground Railroad (2016), and hoped that this next book, the story of a reluctant fence in early-1960s Harlem, would offer a reprieve. “ The Underground Railroad was so heavy that I thought the crime novel might be a good choice for my sanity,” he told The New York Times in 2019 . All that fun, however, would have to wait. Exasperated by the endless cycle of police shootings of Black teenagers, Whitehead decided to pursue another idea he had been working on, a darker tale that became The Nickel Boys (2019), a fictional account of the real-life Dozier School for Boys , a reform school in Florida whose inmates were subjected to brutal beatings, sexual abuse, and murder. Renaming it the Nickel Academy in his novel, Whitehead follows two teenage boys who hastily hatch an escape attempt.

Read: Colson Whitehead on zombies, Zone One , and his love of the VCR

Whitehead’s Harlem caper may seem a dramatic departure from its two sobering predecessors. Yet in their own way, The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys were also crime novels, devoted—much like Harlem Shuffle —to the odyssey of the fugitive. Whitehead’s latest features a young furniture dealer named Ray Carney who is caught up in a jewel heist that forces him to wrestle with the impossible terms confronting him as a Black man trying to get ahead in life. To escape his circumstances, will he fare best simply by following the straight and narrow? Is there such a thing when Black shopkeepers like him cannot secure bank loans? Or should he rely on the world of criminals to get what he wants, what he needs? After all, their ends and means feel no less amoral than what he sees being practiced by businessmen and the moneyed elite. “Crooked world, straight world, same rules,” Ray thinks. “Everybody had a hand out for the envelope.”

Set against a backdrop of the 1964 Harlem race riots, looting, gentrification, and corrupt Black capitalists, Harlem Shuffle is a story about property and the vexed relationship that African Americans have with it. Indeed, what is theft for a people who were themselves once property (“stolen bodies working stolen land,” as Whitehead wrote in The Underground Railroad  ), and for whom their very freedom was the ultimate heist?

We first meet Ray Carney, the proud purveyor of Carney’s Furniture on 125th Street, in 1959 during the civil-rights movement, but the progress he is most interested in is his own. With his name spelled out in large letters on Harlem’s main thoroughfare, he feels confident that he has finally overcome his ignominious family origins. His father, Mike Carney, was a local hustler and petty thief who was gunned down by police while stealing cough syrup from a pharmacy. Early in the novel, Ray recalls being teased in school and, following his father’s advice, hitting one of his bullies in the face with a pipe. He vowed at that moment, he remembers, to chart a new course: “The way he saw it, living taught you that you didn’t have to live the way you’d been taught to live. You came from one place but more important was where you decided to go.” His store, “scrabbled together by his wits and industry,” marks a new chapter for the Carney name, an honest and legitimate one (though he has just launched a “gently used” section full of secondhand items, some of dubious provenance). So when his cousin, Freddie, asks him if he can fence some stolen jewelry, Ray balks. “I sell furniture,” he insists, to which Freddie, who recently brought in a “gently used” TV set, responds, “Nigger, please.”

Ray refuses to see himself as a crook. He does not traffic stolen goods so much as simply recognize “a natural flow of goods in and out and through people’s lives, from here to there, a churn of property.” What, then, to make of the discovery that Ray got the money for the furniture store by finding $30,000 in cash in the spare tire of his late father’s truck? The murky distinction between legality and illegality sits at the core of Harlem Shuffle . Ray encounters two paths: He can follow Freddie into further criminality or try to become an upstanding member of Harlem’s Black business elite.

Yet the distinction between the two slowly starts to blur as Ray realizes that he may need both the scoundrels with guns and the scoundrels with business cards to get what he wants, namely an apartment on Riverside Drive. In time, his sense of right and wrong—and by extension his sense of himself as the son of Mike Carney—is upended. Is Leland, his wife’s father and “one of black Harlem’s premier accountants,” any less of a crook than he or Freddie is? Leland, after all, is always bragging “about his collection of loopholes and dodges,” about how he can “get you off the hook.”

Ray’s desire to be taken seriously as a legitimate businessman is not just about shaking off the reputation of his father; he also wants to stick his self-made success in the face of his wife’s family. Owners of a townhouse on Strivers’ Row in Harlem and descendants of Seneca Village, a community of Black landowners in Manhattan that was razed to make Central Park , Leland and Alma Jones regard their daughter’s choice of husband with a disdain that borders on shame, referring to him as “some sort of rug peddler.” When Freddie presents Ray with the opportunity to fence stolen articles from safe-deposit boxes at the Hotel Theresa, the “Waldorf of Harlem” and host to the Black bourgeoisie, it feels less like robbery and more like a revenge fantasy.

When he gets an opportunity to join the Dumas Club, an elite association of Black businessmen that Leland belongs to, that fantasy only intensifies. A member of the club board, a well-known banker named Wilfred Duke, presses for $500—what Ray considers “a sweetener”—to make the deal happen. When it doesn’t, a furious Ray concocts an elaborate plot involving a drug dealer, a pimp, and a crooked cop to bring down Duke, who sees nothing wrong with the transaction: It was an investment that fell through, in the eyes of a man busy “at the bank snatching back loans, foreclosing on hope.”

In the moral universe of Harlem Shuffle , the honest in honest work is literal. The novel privileges the perspectives of its avowed criminals—thieves, mobsters, and prostitutes, all candid about the nature of their profession—over those who have convinced themselves that their dubious machinations are ethical, which is to say bankers, real-estate developers, and the suits who work to find them loopholes. When looting breaks out during the riots, Leland deplores the “shiftless element” that has infiltrated the more respectable student protest movement. Whitehead juxtaposes Ray’s view: When he sees signs protesting eminent domain where extended construction of the World Trade Center is set to begin, he thinks back to the looting. That “devastation had been nothing compared to what lay before him,” he thinks. “If you bottled the rage and hope and fury of all the people of Harlem and made it into a bomb, the results would look something like this.” Can theft really be a crime, the novel asks us, in a country built on it?

Ray’s insights are part of what makes him bewildering as a character. Though himself a professional fence—by the novel’s end he’s stopped trying to think otherwise—he never gives up on the prosperity gospel or the promises of Black capitalism. When the looting dies down, he is relieved; his primary concern isn’t the fate of Black teenagers like James Powell (whose shooting sparked the riots), but his business and those of his fellow Black store owners. Indeed, none of the criminals whom the novel holds up as having profound moral clarity about the hypocrisy of the ruling classes shows any interest in Black protest or even Black history (which feels especially significant, given Whitehead’s recent dedication to the historical novel). “How am I supposed to get a motherfucking sandwich with all that going on?” Freddie fumes when the riots close down restaurants. The Hotel Theresa heist occurs on Juneteenth. The organizer of the robbery, a gangster named Miami Joe, doesn’t know it is Juneteenth, but welcomes the coincidence, hoping someone will think it was a racially motivated hit and get thrown off the scent.

Ray displays a pessimism not unlike that of Jack Turner in The Nickel Boys . Turner is the foil to Elwood Curtis, an idealistic young Black man who throws himself into the civil-rights movement and writes pieces about social justice for the Chicago Defender . Despite the brutal unfairness Elwood suffers, he has faith in the innate goodness of people and is convinced that if he can just get a letter to the state inspectors, they will shut down the school. Jack is incredulous. “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there,” Jack says. “You got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” Jack sees Black survival as something that has to be seized when those in power are looking the other way; in short, it must be stolen.

Jack and Ray both recognize justice and injustice as a false binary. Jack was sent to a reform school that was itself run by criminals, and the people who steal most brazenly from Ray do not see themselves as crooks, but as legitimate businessmen. Jack’s experience turns him into a realist, not an activist. Frustratingly, Ray likewise remains a pragmatist, never fully disavowing the charms of the Black bourgeoisie—a choice that is of course his right, just as it is Whitehead’s to write a novel devoid of prescriptions. In fact, his refusal might even be considered radical at a moment when readers are turning to Black writers for answers rather than for art.

Whitehead follows in a long tradition of Black writers who employ crime fiction subversively, using the genre against itself to expose the hypocrisies of the justice system, the false moral dictates set by capitalism , and the very fact that America itself was born of a theft that we are all complicit in. Indeed, what good is a standard whodunit when the answer is “everyone”? Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins series , which follows a conflicted Black private eye as he reluctantly works for the police, acknowledges the richness of African American life in Los Angeles, often neglected in classic L.A. noir stories. Pauline Hopkins, whose Hagar’s Daughter (1901) is considered one of the first works of African American detective fiction, employs the genre’s devices to make a thriller out of Civil War–era Black life, using passing to satisfy the trope of mistaken identity. The satirist Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972) has been called by some an “anti–detective novel” in the sense that it eschews the classic figure of the white detective as empiricist (Holmes, Poirot, etc.) in favor of PaPa LaBas, an “astrodetective” who conjures clues with the help of “jewelry, Black astrology charts, herbs, potions, candles, talismans.”

Harlem Shuffle strikes me as doing a bit of each of these things, and more. What we call a crime and whom we label a criminal are clearly issues very much on Whitehead’s mind—and his added twist is to leave out the figure of the detective altogether. The cops are all paid off; the characters fear payback, not jail time. Some readers may find the absence of a real police presence in the novel a missed opportunity for social commentary, but others—I’m among them—can appreciate that Whitehead’s omission allows the people in his book to savor the delight that transgression brings. Understanding all too well how little the world has to offer his characters—Black men and women who scrounge so they can buy a piece of furniture from Ray’s store on a payment plan—he cannot bring himself to deprive them of a small part in a caper. Few of his crooks get off entirely free (the gangsters and the businessmen they represent eventually come knocking). Still, many are given a brief moment to revel in the high of the heist, which is close enough.

This article appears in the October 2021 print edition with the headline “Colson Whitehead Subverts the Crime Novel.”

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HARLEM SHUFFLE

by Colson Whitehead ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 14, 2021

As one of Whitehead’s characters might say of their creator, When you’re hot, you’re hot.

After winning back-to-back Pulitzer Prizes for his previous two books, Whitehead lets fly with a typically crafty change-up: a crime novel set in mid-20th-century Harlem.

The twin triumphs of The Underground Railroad (2016) and The Nickel Boys (2019) may have led Whitehead’s fans to believe he would lean even harder on social justice themes in his next novel. But by now, it should be clear that this most eclectic of contemporary masters never repeats himself, and his new novel is as audacious, ingenious, and spellbinding as any of his previous period pieces. Its unlikely and appealing protagonist is Ray Carney, who, when the story begins in 1959, is expecting a second child with his wife, Elizabeth, while selling used furniture and appliances on Harlem’s storied, ever bustling 125th Street. Ray’s difficult childhood as a hoodlum’s son forced to all but raise himself makes him an exemplar of the self-made man to everybody but his upper-middle-class in-laws, aghast that their daughter and grandchildren live in a small apartment within earshot of the subway tracks. Try as he might, however, Ray can’t quite wrest free of his criminal roots. To help make ends meet as he struggles to grow his business, Ray takes covert trips downtown to sell lost or stolen jewelry, some of it coming through the dubious means of Ray’s ne’er-do-well cousin, Freddie, who’s been getting Ray into hot messes since they were kids. Freddie’s now involved in a scheme to rob the Hotel Theresa, the fabled “Waldorf of Harlem," and he wants his cousin to fence whatever he and his unsavory, volatile cohorts take in. This caper, which goes wrong in several perilous ways, is only the first in a series of strenuous tests of character and resources Ray endures from the back end of the 1950s to the Harlem riots of 1964. Throughout, readers will be captivated by a Dickensian array of colorful, idiosyncratic characters, from itchy-fingered gangsters to working-class women with a low threshold for male folly. What’s even more impressive is Whitehead’s densely layered, intricately woven rendering of New York City in the Kennedy era, a time filled with both the bright promise of greater economic opportunity and looming despair due to the growing heroin plague. It's a city in which, as one character observes, “everybody’s kicking back or kicking up. Unless you’re on top.”

Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-385-54513-6

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: June 15, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021

LITERARY FICTION | THRILLER | CRIME & LEGAL THRILLER | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE

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PERSPECTIVES

THE GOD OF THE WOODS

by Liz Moore ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 2, 2024

"Don't go into the woods" takes on unsettling new meaning in Moore's blend of domestic drama and crime novel.

Many years after her older brother, Bear, went missing, Barbara Van Laar vanishes from the same sleepaway camp he did, leading to dark, bitter truths about her wealthy family.

One morning in 1975 at Camp Emerson—an Adirondacks summer camp owned by her family—it's discovered that 13-year-old Barbara isn't in her bed. A problem case whose unhappily married parents disdain her goth appearance and "stormy" temperament, Barbara is secretly known by one bunkmate to have slipped out every night after bedtime. But no one has a clue where's she permanently disappeared to, firing speculation that she was taken by a local serial killer known as Slitter. As Jacob Sluiter, he was convicted of 11 murders in the 1960s and recently broke out of prison. He's the one, people say, who should have been prosecuted for Bear's abduction, not a gardener who was framed. Leave it to the young and unproven assistant investigator, Judy Luptack, to press forward in uncovering the truth, unswayed by her bullying father and male colleagues who question whether women are "cut out for this work." An unsavory group portrait of the Van Laars emerges in which the children's father cruelly abuses their submissive mother, who is so traumatized by the loss of Bear—and the possible role she played in it—that she has no love left for her daughter. Picking up on the themes of families in search of themselves she explored in  Long Bright River (2020), Moore draws sympathy to characters who have been subjected to spousal, parental, psychological, and physical abuse. As rich in background detail and secondary mysteries as it is, this ever-expansive, intricate, emotionally engaging novel never seems overplotted. Every piece falls skillfully into place and every character, major and minor, leaves an imprint.

Pub Date: July 2, 2024

ISBN: 9780593418918

Page Count: 496

Publisher: Riverhead

Review Posted Online: April 13, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024

LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE

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by Liz Moore

SEEN & HEARD

THE MAN WHO LIVED UNDERGROUND

by Richard Wright ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 20, 2021

A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.

A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.

Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son  and Black Boy , this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.

Pub Date: April 20, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Library of America

Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021

LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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by Richard Wright

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Colson Whitehead Finally Gets To Flex His Comedy Muscle

After writing his Pulitzer Prize-winning books The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys , author Colson Whitehead needed a change of pace. So for his next novel, Harlem Shuffle , he decided to tackle topics near and dear to his heart: heists and New York real estate. In today's episode, Morning Edition host Noel King talks to Whitehead about his book's protagonist, a furniture retailer named Ray Carney, and what draws him to a double life of crime.

Want to learn more?

Find out where you can purchase a copy of the book.

Read Denny S. Bryce's review of Harlem Shuffle for NPR Books.

Listen to Colson Whitehead talk about the novel with Fresh Air's Terry Gross.

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Book review: Colson Whitehead's criminally good turn in Harlem Shuffle

Harlem Shuffle

By Colson Whitehead Fiction/Fleet/Paperback/318 pages/$29.95/ Available here 4 out of 5

Ray Carney is "only slightly bent" when it comes to "being crooked".

He is an upstanding business owner, a purveyor of decent furniture, a family man. Few know he is the son of an infamous hoodlum. And if his cousin Freddie drops off a radio or necklace of uncertain origin at his store from time to time, he asks no questions.

Whitehead has won two Pulitzer Prizes for The Underground Railroad (2016, available here ) and The Nickel Boys (2019, available here ), harrowing novels that delved into some of the darkest moments of African-American history.

Now, it seems he would like to kick up his heels a little, and this novel feels like the most fun he has had in years.

Harlem Shuffle, which shares the name of a 1963 R&B song, is a stylish, urbane take on hard-boiled crime fiction in the vein of American novelists Cornell Woolrich or W.R. Burnett, but set in the mid-century Harlem of New York City.

It is structured around three heists - or, rather, two heists sandwiching a revenge plot - and Whitehead delivers the goods with both the eloquence of an urban theorist and the relish of an old genre hand.

Carney's wife Elizabeth grew up on the affluent Striver's Row and his snooty in-laws look down on his poky apartment across from the subway tracks.

He dreams of a bigger home in a better class of neighbourhood for his growing family, though selling instalment-plan sofas is not likely to get him there with any speed.

Things go awry when Freddie, a man whose "common sense tended to fall out of a hole in his pocket", falls in with some dangerous characters.

He accidentally volunteers Carney as the fence for an audacious robbery of the Hotel Theresa, a beloved Harlem institution - "like taking a p*** on the Statue of Liberty", thinks Carney in horror.

If there is a weak part to this story, it is the bond between Carney and Freddie, upon which much of the plot hinges, but which never feels convincing enough to warrant the risks Carney takes for his cousin.

One is easily distracted from this, however, by the novel's colourful cast, like the heist's menacing mastermind, the purple-suited Miami Joe: "The only thing he dressed up nicely was himself; all else remained as naked and uncomplicated as God had created it."

The way Whitehead maps the chameleonic, changing networks of the city onto the psyche of his ambitious protagonist is nothing short of masterful.

"Urban blight" spreads from the deterioration of one building: "The sickness originated at Mam Lacey's and tendriled out." Carney wants a home on the river where he can put "the city behind him as if it didn't exist".

Carney, who spends the novel shuffling between his two selves - citizen and criminal, and all too often the twain shall meet - learns about dorveille, a mediaeval French concept of a period of midnight wakefulness.

Dorvay, as he prefers to spell it, is "crooked heaven, when the straight world slept and the bent got to work".

Through his knowledge of the secret knocks and back doors of Harlem, the reader gains access to an underworld of the urban African-American experience.

"The doorways were entrances into different cities - no, different entrances into one vast, secret city," he thinks. "Ever close, adjacent to all you know, just underneath. If you know where to look."

If you like this, read: Velvet Was The Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Quercus, 2021, $32.95, available here ) , a noirish tale set in 1970s Mexico City. Maite, an unfulfilled secretary, goes looking for her missing neighbour Leonora and is drawn into a complex web of student radicals and shadowy government agents. She crosses paths with Elvis, a reluctant criminal who loves old movies and rock 'n' roll.

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Colson Whitehead Returns to Harlem, and His Hero Returns to Crime

“Crook Manifesto,” set in the 1970s, finds the “Harlem Shuffle” protagonist Ray Carney drawn back into the game in order to score Jackson 5 tickets for his daughter.

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CROOK MANIFESTO , by Colson Whitehead

Returning to the world of his novel “Harlem Shuffle,” Colson Whitehead’s “Crook Manifesto” is a dazzling treatise, a glorious and intricate anatomy of the heist, the con and the slow game. There’s an element of crime here, certainly, but as in Whitehead’s previous books, genre isn’t the point. Here he uses the crime novel as a lens to investigate the mechanics of a singular neighborhood at a particular tipping point in time. He has it right: the music, the energy, the painful calculus of loss. Structured into three time periods — 1971, 1973 and finally the year of America’s bicentennial celebration, 1976 — “Crook Manifesto” gleefully detonates its satire upon this world while getting to the heart of the place and its people.

This is a story of survival without redemption, where the next generation loses some of the well-honed instincts that have built this world. Whitehead’s hero, the furniture salesman and opportunistic small-time criminal Ray Carney, is older than he was when we last met. He has retreated from his practice of working in the “secondary economy.” But outside his successful furniture business’s showroom window, Harlem is stirring with the unease of change and oppression.

The presence of the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army has set a new edge to the age-old battle between the neighborhood and the white policemen riding roughshod down its streets. From behind his store’s plate-glass window Carney takes it all in: the thump of car engines, the shouts and taunts, the stand-downs of Black men being pushed against walls and searched by white police officers, the news headlines of police officers killed. Sirens cut through conversations; people traverse the powerful river of the sounds and smells that are Harlem.

Carney wants to stay out of trouble, but his daughter, who feels lost to him through teenage angst, wants tickets to see the Jackson 5, a show sold out long ago. Whitehead uses that bittersweet pull of parental loss to plunge into a comedic — and deadly — journey. From here Carney revisits and rekindles connections he once had and paid dearly to leave behind. He blunders through criminals’ apartments, carries hot jewels in his briefcase and is forced to rob a poker game.

Carney is resigned and observant, a participant and a hostage, as he embarks on a nightmarish shotgun ride across New York City. His navigator and terrorizer on the journey is a corrupt white cop who won’t stop talking about ringolevio, the street game that Carney and his friends used to play in Harlem and the cop played in his own childhood neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen. The more the cop talks, the more Carney tries to figure a way out, an exit. He becomes an unwilling confessor and witness to an old truth: No one escapes. It sets up a cascading series of tragedies, through “Don Quixote”-like adventures, to set the scales right, to create a new kind of version of who he is, what Harlem is.

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Reviews of Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead

Summary | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio

Harlem Shuffle

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• Sep 14, 2021, 336 pages
• Aug 2022, 336 pages

• Historical Fiction
• Mid-Atlantic, USA
• New York State
• 1940s & '50s
• 1960s & '70s
• Black Authors
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About This Book

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Book Summary

From the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys , a gloriously entertaining novel of heists, shakedowns, and rip-offs set in Harlem in the 1960s.

"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.

CHAPTER ONE

His cousin Freddie brought him on the heist one hot night in early June. Ray Carney was having one of his run-around days—uptown, downtown, zipping across the city. Keeping the machine humming. First up was Radio Row, to unload the final three consoles, two RCAs and a Magnavox, and pick up the TV he left. He'd given up on the radios, hadn't sold one in a year and a half no matter how much he marked them down and begged. Now they took up space in the basement that he needed for the new recliners coming in from Argent next week and whatever he picked up from the dead lady's apartment that afternoon. The radios were top-of-the-line three years ago; now padded blankets hid their slick mahogany cabinets, fastened by leather straps to the truck bed. The pickup bounced in the unholy rut of the West Side Highway. Just that morning there was another article in the Tribune about the city tearing down the elevated highway. Narrow and indifferently cobblestoned, the road ...

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

• Carney is described as being "only slightly bent when it came to being crooked, in practice and ambition" (page 31)—suggesting a more nuanced understanding of seemingly criminal activity. How does his placement on the crooked spectrum change throughout the course of the novel? How does his ...
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Reader reviews, bookbrowse review.

Whitehead is a masterful writer, able to present characters and scenes that draw us in with fast-paced action, while also slowing down to provide enough gratifying and diverting details that allow us to enjoy the historical backdrop where the excitement unfolds. He is cerebral enough to pepper his deceptively simple prose with reflections upon double consciousness, race theory and criticisms of capitalism and privilege. At the same time, while we're entertained, surprised and intellectually stimulated by the novel's outstanding execution, somewhere a beating heart is missing. The novel is so plot-driven and filled with so much, that Whitehead overlooks delving into the rich internal lives... continued

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(Reviewed by Jennifer Hon Khalaf ).

Beyond the Book

Harlem and the end of the civil rights era.

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Harlem Shuffle: Summary and Ending Explained

By: Author Luka

Posted on Last updated: August 14, 2024

Categories Reading Guides

Harlem Shuffle is a crime novel written by Colson Whitehead in 2021. It’s set in Harlem during the late 1950s and early 1960s, providing a glimpse into African American life in New York City during a time of significant change.

This book is a sequel to Whitehead’s 2019 work, The Nickel Boys, which earned him a second Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Summary | Ending Explained | Book Club Questions

Harlem Shuffle Summary

In June 1959, we follow the story of Raymond “Ray” Carney, an African American furniture salesman in New York City. Ray, whose father Big Mike had a criminal background in Harlem, wants to prove he can run an honest furniture store. However, he’s involved in secret dealings with stolen goods. Ray’s wife, Elizabeth, is expecting their second child, and he struggles to make ends meet. Elizabeth’s successful parents disapprove of Ray due to his family’s reputation.

After a family dinner, Ray meets his cousin Freddie, who is connected to a gangster named Miami Joe planning a heist at the Hotel Theresa. Freddie asks Ray to use his store to sell stolen goods, but Ray initially plans to refuse. Despite his decision, Freddie and Miami Joe carry out the robbery, taking a valuable necklace that belongs to a local mobster named Chink Montague.

Freddie asks for Ray’s help in selling the stolen necklace. The gang, which includes a seasoned criminal named Pepper and an elderly safecracker named Arthur, meets at Ray’s store. They agree to keep a low profile for a while but insist that Ray sells the stolen necklace promptly.

After Arthur is murdered, Pepper forces Ray to drive around Harlem searching for Miami Joe. They can’t find him, but Ray later spots Joe on the street, narrowly avoiding getting shot. When Ray returns to his store, Joe is waiting for him. Before Joe can harm Ray, Pepper arrives and shoots Joe, instructing Ray to dispose of the body. Ray follows through and then goes back home.

In the following years, Ray Carney sees a surge in his shady business, peddling more stolen goods and growing his furniture store. An opportunity arises for him to join the Dumas Club, an African American group his father-in-law belongs to. However, the club rejects Ray, claiming he’s too dark-skinned and from the wrong background.

Wilfred Duke, a local businessman, offers to secure Ray’s membership for $500. Ignoring his wife Elizabeth’s warnings, Ray pays up, only to be rejected by the club and refused a refund by Duke. This prompts Ray to hatch a revenge plan against Duke.

During this time, Ray encounters his cousin Freddie, who’s staying with a wealthy white friend named Linus. Despite Ray’s concerns, Freddie denies any involvement with drugs. Ray discovers Duke’s connection to a prostitute named Laura and involves her in his revenge plot.

Hiring Pepper to spy on Duke, Ray orchestrates a scheme involving Laura’s pimp, drugging Duke, and capturing scandalous photos. Ray leaks the photos to the newspaper, causing Duke to vanish from Harlem with millions of stolen dollars. While this wreaks havoc on many lives, including Ray’s in-laws, Ray is content with the outcome, despite the high cost of his revenge.

Fast forward three years, and Ray’s legitimate business is thriving. His furniture store and illegal dealings expand, allowing him to move his family to a better apartment. Harlem is in turmoil with protests and riots after a white police officer kills a young Black boy, reminiscent of the 1964 killing of 15-year-old James Powell by Officer Thomas Gilligan. Despite the unrest, Ray’s business remains untouched.

Out of the blue, Freddie shows up at Ray’s store, urgently asking him to stash a briefcase. Inside, there are things Freddie and his friend Linus swiped from Linus’s wealthy family, the Van Wycks. The next day, Ray faces questions from Chink Montague about Freddie, and despite the pressure, Ray denies any involvement.

Visiting the hideout where Freddie and Linus were staying, Ray finds Linus dead, and Freddie is nowhere in sight. Police interrupt a crucial meeting the next day to grill Ray about Freddie and Linus. Upon opening the briefcase, Ray discovers paperwork and a seriously valuable emerald necklace.

Freddie’s mother’s place gets ransacked, indicating that Freddie is in serious trouble. When Freddie turns up at Ray’s furniture store, he spills the beans about the heist being Linus’s brainchild, and they got caught by Linus’s controlling father, Ambrose Van Wyck. Ray enlists Pepper’s help to get Freddie out of harm’s way and safeguard his store.

Ray tries to sell the emerald necklace but faces threats from Van Wyck’s lawyer. The Van Wycks take the necklace, and Ray makes a daring escape. Upon returning to the store, Ray finds Pepper injured, having faced off against Van Wyck’s henchmen. The lawyer contacts Ray, revealing they have Freddie and demanding an exchange for the documents in the briefcase.

Reviewing the documents, Ray discovers they give Ambrose power of attorney over Linus. Reluctantly, Ray agrees to the exchange. During the swap, a battered Freddie is placed in Ray’s truck. Pepper takes down two henchmen, abandoning the documents, and they escape, rushing Freddie to the hospital. Unfortunately, Freddie doesn’t make it. The Van Wyck family considers the matter closed. Ray strolls through Harlem, contemplating his recent experiences and the growth of his business.

Harlem Shuffle Ending Explained

The final chapters of the novel explain the ending of Harlem Shuffle, with the story picking up the pace from Chapter 6 to 9.

Ray becomes fixated on the emerald necklace, thinking it’s the main target of his enemies. However, he realizes that the Van Wyck family is indifferent to the necklace’s value. In a conversation with Ed Bench, Ray learns that the real worth lies in the paperwork inside the briefcase. Initially overlooking the documents, Ray reevaluates them and discovers their significance in a tax avoidance scheme related to New York City real estate.

This revelation serves as a stark reminder to Ray that, despite his efforts to improve or profit from his crimes, he remains at the bottom of the societal ladder. The Van Wycks operate on a level of criminality beyond his imagination, shielded from consequences by their wealth. Despite Ambrose Van Wyck’s physical vulnerability, evident in the earlier clash with Linus, his success in the money-driven realm of New York real estate prevails. Ambrose achieves all his desires by the novel’s end, regaining the paperwork, losing the son he despised, and expanding his property holdings across New York.

The story portrays Ambrose as a triumphant villain, not due to any inherent skill but because the overwhelming influence of wealth and prejudice in the world of “Harlem Shuffle” ensures his perpetual victory. Ambrose’s institutional advantage is ingrained in the system from the beginning, highlighting the structural inequalities and challenges Ray faces in his pursuit of success.

In spite of Ambrose Van Wyck’s apparent triumphs, Ray does carve out a significant level of success. His furniture business expands, and he becomes the first African American dealer for a prestigious furniture brand—a groundbreaking achievement that fills him with pride. Contemplating a move to Striver’s Row, a place he once only dreamed of, signifies an unexpected accomplishment. However, in contrast to Ambrose’s consequence-free criminal success, Ray pays a steep price, losing Freddie and bringing financial hardship to his in-laws.

The novel’s concluding scenes underscore the transformative nature of the world. Ray, a dark-skinned African American from humble beginnings, defies dismissal to achieve success. His triumph is intertwined with the changing landscape surrounding him. New York’s and Harlem’s traditional foundations crumble to make way for unbridled capitalist growth.

The closure and replacement of family stores with skyscrapers mark this shift. While civil rights progress may be gradual, Ray reaps the benefits of a world increasingly fueled by capital. He sees this as a lesson—that hard work and intelligence can empower an African American in a racist world, even though the risk of police targeting persists.

Yet, as Ray stands on the edge of this changing world, the conclusion is far from a promise of fairness, morality, or reduced violence. At the end of the story, in a cynical and pessimistic realization, Ray acknowledges that profit will always prevail. Capitalism may facilitate individual success for African Americans like Ray, but it falls short of addressing the systemic racism that initially obstructed his path.

Happy reading! ❤️

I love to read and I enjoy exploring a range of genres including contemporary and historical fiction, mysteries, thrillers, nonfiction, and memoirs. If you would like me to review your book, feel free to reach out to me!