Harlem Shuffle

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.

I read this because my book club recommended it. Even though it's not my genre, I thought it might be a good opportunity to stretch myself, to get myself out of my usual reading habits. I thought it might be a bit like The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay - enjoyable because it's impressively well written.

But, this book felt formulaic. It felt like it was steady work for the author, rather than art. Like a paper that'd you'd write for school rather than an essay you're dying to publish.

There wasn't much interesting dialogue or plot. We know hardly anything about Carney's wife, apart from where she works. What would it be like to married to someone on the edge of crime? What kind of fears would you have? How would you know your husband was still alive, day after day? What if you couldn't reach him? Now that would be interesting.

I did really like the details of the neighborhood and the people who lived there. The author must have done a tremendous amount of research. But, the details couldn't really make up for the lack of plot and thin characters.

Edit: I wonder if telling this in the first person might have really improved things. The info dumps of research would have to go, because Carney doesn't seem like someone focused on history. Also, Carney as an unreliable narrator might have created more interest (is Freddie a bum or a victim? Is Carney being fair to him?). The kind of thing I'm looking for is detailed scenes from his perspective: “when I said I was going to be headed out for a bit, Elizabeth set down her glass very slowly, but didn't say anything.” Something that indicates there's tension, without directly saying “if my wife finds out about this, she's going to leave me”. The book actually does say this directly :(

I'm an avid audiobook listener. In my opinion this book would be better read than listened to. The writing is rich, vivid, emotional, powerful, and needs to be savored.

This book with be on in re-read pile to READ so I can get the full experience.

I'm not going to rehash what the story is about; you can do that on your own. I highly recommend you buy this book at your indie book store, find your comfy couch with your beverage of choice, and indulge your senses.

This is my first Colson Whitehead novel. I have a number of his books on my TBR but I always tend to put off reading books that are what I put in the category of “heavier novels”. However, this one was a great balance.

This book chronicles the life of a business owning black man in 60's era Harlem. Ray Carney comes from a crooked family. Raised by his father who was a known crook. As an adult, Ray went to college and got his business degree and now owns a furniture store. He's legit and provides for his wife and 2 children. Even he if does meddle in products that were acquired by less than honest means. He's only “a little crooked”. There is also a heist of a prominent Harlem hotel that Carney is pulled into by his cousin Freddy, that doesn't go all that smoothly.

I loved Whitehead's writing. There were points in the book that fell flat and made me a little bored but they were easy to get through due to the beautiful writing. This book chronicles what is was like in 60's Harlem as a black man, an entrepreneur, and as a crook. The characters are all interesting and there's even some humor that if you don't pay attention, you could miss. I am very excited to read his other books now that I've dipped my toes. I recommend this for those that enjoy a good crime book and historical fiction.

Thank you Netgalley and Double day for providing an eARC for an honest review.

Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead—the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner—is a novel of literary fiction based in the crime world of 1960s Harlem, New York. The book description from the publisher describes it best: “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. 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... 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.”

Protagonist / anti-hero Ray Carney appears to be a legit furniture store owner to everyone in his life, even his wife, but his crooked cousin Freddie is always enticing Carney to dip his toes in the waters of the crime world. To the hoods of Harlem, Carney isn't a legit businessman. He's a “fence,” someone who appears to be legit but is really allowing petty crimes to filter through his furniture store. When his cousin convinces him to be a part of a heist of one of the fancier hotels in Harlem, Carney officially becomes a part of the crime world. His no-good cousin gets into hot water, threatening to bring Carney's façade to light.

This novel is told in three parts. The first was interesting, zipping along with taut, crackling writing. It's Whitehead; I came to expect it and reveled in his beautiful sentences. But the second part of the novel sagged, bordering on being... boring. I almost put the novel down for good four or five times. Some of this has to do with the nature of Carney's criminal endeavors. Reading about Carney trafficking in stolen TV sets or the quality furniture of deceased Harlem citizens is like getting the lowdown about a crooked accountant adjusting the books or writing bad checks—not very exciting. But once cousin Freddie states in the latter part of the novel, “I was pulling a Ray-ray... Keeping my head down, keeping it boring” I realized that maybe the slowness of Part Two was by design. Carney was attempting to live an undetectable life, and it came through in Part Two to the detriment of my attention. Fortunately, Part Three picks up as Freddie's bad choices pile up and his junkie buddy Linus winds up dead in a bath tub, alerting his wealthy family to find Carney and retrieve what Freddie had taken from them and was unwittingly in Carney's possession.

In spite of the novel's sagging middle, there are some amazing set pieces in 1960s Harlem as described throughout by Whitehead, and the racial injustice of police brutality of the 60s is all the more relevant today. The stakes are raised in Part Three as everything Carney has built is threatened by Freddie's bad choices, as well as his relationship to his cousin that is something more akin to close brotherhood. Whitehead has a gift for wrapping up stories, and the final chapter delivers in spades, a limber denouement packed with concluding details. But after reading Whitehead's previous, stellar novel Nickel Boys, I expected more from Harlem Shuffle. Wishful thinking on my part, but this was still an enjoyable read nonetheless.

I enjoyed this book and I recommend it. I would give this book 4 stars.