Harlem Shuffle

Up to now I had read only one of Colson Whitehead's novels: The Intuitionist, his debut. I found that book ambitious but contrived, a flawed first try; somehow I had not sampled another until his latest, Harlem Shuffle. Harlem Shuffle is a pretty straight-ahead literary crime novel, set between 1959 and 1964 in– good guess!– Harlem and environs. The crime genre imposes its own set of rules on storytelling, and Whitehead embraces the discipline with gusto.

Our hero is Ray Carney, who owns a successful furniture store catering to the growing if tenuous postwar Black middle class. Despite having grown up around crooks, including his truly bad-guy father, Carney runs a legitimate business– well, mostly legit, at least most of the time, at least in the beginning. As often happens in such books, one thing leads to another, and Carney finds it increasingly difficult to escape his criminal connections and relations– especially his trouble-making cousin Freddie– not to mention the demands of his own ambition as a "striver." The story is deftly told, the main characters are vividly drawn, and the writing is first-rate. 

Whitehead is particularly good on the everyday corruption of life in the city. Even as an upstanding businessman, Carney is forced to count various payoffs as a cost of doing business: an envelope for the beat cop, an envelope for mob protection. Most galling, and consequential, is the envelope for the Harlem banker to ease Carney's way into membership of the Black elite's Dumas Club. Corruption and criminality are baked into the Manhattan economy for Blacks and whites alike, so fencing a few items of questionable provenance is less a matter of crossing a line than a choice of product lines and assessing risk vs. return. 

If you are a regular reader of crime fiction, Harlem Shuffle's characters and themes will call to mind the recent crop of excellent historically informed crime and suspense novels about complex Black characters struggling to keep their moral compass while navigating the waters of racist America– novels written by such "genre" writers as Walter Mosley, of course, and more recently Attica Locke and S.A. Cosby. It's no insult to be listed in that company. Although Colson Whitehead is renowned as a writer of "serious" literature, and I'm eager to explore more of his contributions there, if there's a sequel to Harlem Shuffle, I'm on it.