Colson Whitehead’s last two novels, The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, both won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making him the first Black author to win that prize twice. Both were serious novels, the first with fantastical elements to try to tell a familiar story in a new way, the latter more straightforward, but neither presaged what he’s done in his latest novel, Harlem Shuffle, which is funnier, more action-packed, and just generally more entertaining.
Harlem Shuffle is the story of two men in that part of Manhattan in the early 1960s. Raymond, the son of a crook who has become an entrepreneur, owns a furniture store in Harlem that caters to the customers the white-owned stores downtown won’t serve. Freddie, his ne’er-do-well cousin, has been getting Ray in trouble since they were kids, and this time, he lands Ray smack in the middle of a heist that has half of Harlem looking for them, and involves Ray with the kind of people he never wanted to be involved with – the people with whom his father did jobs, that is. When a mobster’s goons show up at the store, and a crooked cop does too, things go pear-shaped for the cousins, leaving Raymond to try to find a way to clean up the mess and protect his family. Meanwhile, Ray’s situation at home is always tenuous. He needs a bigger house for his growing family, while his in-laws continue to look down on him as the son of a crook, which makes him not good enough for their daughter. He’s already conflicted about taking any money from Freddie’s shenanigans, but now anything he gets from the big score would help him move to a better place … while also risking further scorn from his in-laws and even the trust of his wife.
My experience with Whitehead is limited to the two novels that won him the Pulitzer, both of which were weighted down with heavy themes and only lightened by Whitehead’s remarkable prose and rich characterization. Here, Whitehead gets to have some fun, even though there are undercurrents of violence, internecine warfare in Harlem’s Black community, white cops assaulting Black citizens (including the real Harlem riots of 1964, which occur right around Ray’s store and shut down much of the commerce on which he depends), and more. There’s also a subtle theme of the growing divide within the Black community between the upwardly mobile and those still held down by the extensive obstacles of the time and the history of oppression that still limits Black Americans’ economic opportunities today.
I’ve seen media coverage of Harlem Shuffle that makes it sound like a heist novel – possibly pushed by the publisher – but it’s more heist-adjacent, since Ray doesn’t participate in the heist itself, just in the misadventures that follow when you steal something that a very powerful and violent person would not want to have stolen. Whitehead adapts one of the best aspects of the heist genre, or just the hard-boiled crime genre in general – the array of eccentric and often funny side characters that populate many of those novels. A thief named Pepper who worked with Ray’s dad turns out to be a pivotal character as the novel progresses. Miami Joe is one of the main antagonists in the first part of the novel. Chet the Vet is so-called because he went to vet school for all of a month before turning to crime. Between these fun, if only morally compromised, side characters and Whitehead’s ability to shift between the highbrow prose of his award-winning novels and the vernacular of his 1960s setting, Harlem Shuffle was a blast to read, perhaps an entrée into his work for folks who want to start with some lighter fare before reading his two more serious books.
Next up: David Ewalt’s Of Dice and Men, recommended to me by Foxing lead singer/songwriter (and longtime D&D player) Connor Murphy.