In one or two sentences at the end of a chapter, Whitehead can change the book’s whole trajectory. The novel gains force through accumulation and acceleration – brake and gas, gas and brake, until we are far from where we started. The three acts could make satisfying novellas on their own, but they’re better together. What’s our responsibility to the greater social good? The three parts present our options: descent, personal advancement, social progress. “The mistake was to believe he’d become someone else.” Act 3 considers whether a man should step up to help others. We could call this the illusion of advancement we all get suckered into it. Act 2 considers Carney’s upward criminal climb. Act 1 shows how easily a man can step downward into crime. The novel is structured in three instalments, covering a period from 1959 to 1964, each climactically peaking with criminal activity. 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.īut mostly, it's a joy to read, another dazzling novel from the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning Colson Whitehead.Colson Whitehead. Harlem Shuffle's ingenious story plays out in a beautifully recreated New York City of the early 1960s. 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? As Ray navigates this double life, he begins to see who actually pulls the strings in Harlem.

Thus begins the internal tussle between Ray the striver and Ray the crook. Now Ray has a new clientele, one made up of shady cops, vicious local gangsters, two-bit pornographers, and other assorted Harlem lowlifes. The heist doesn't go as planned they rarely do.

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. He knows a discreet jeweler downtown who doesn't ask questions, either. Cracks that are getting bigger all the time.Ĭash 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 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.įew 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. '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.

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