Books I've read: Harlem Shuffle

 

I'm late to the whole Colson Whitehead thing, I know....  I picked this up at the library because I've heard so much about this author and it seemed wrong that I hadn't read anything from him yet.  Maybe I picked the wrong book to start with, but I really am not sure what all the fuss is about.

There's nothing really wrong with this book, but I didn't love it.  It took me almost three weeks to read which is VERY unlike me.  I just wasn't into it so much that I was compelled to get back to it any time I had a spare moment.

Set in 1960s Harlem, it's about Ray Carney, a guy who is kind of a crook.  Only kind of though.  Outwardly he's a respectable business owner trying to do right by his family and get ahead.  His cousin Freddie is a career criminal and has a bad habit of getting Ray involved.  And Ray can't say no to Freddie.

The book follows Ray across many years as he tries to balance these two sides of his life, keep his family ignorant of his more shady dealings and keep himself form getting himself killed.

The book has a colourful cast of characters as you'd expect from a story about the criminal underworld.  It also paints a vivid picture of Harlem at the time, the power players and racial tensions that seethe beneath the surface of the seemingly thriving community.

Yes somehow this book didn't quite work for me.  It wasn't gripping enough to satisfy as a crime novel, yet wasn't quite a character study or an examination of the society at the time.  It was all three and it didn't quite work as any of these things entirely.

It's a hard one for me to talk about because I didn't dislike it.  But I didn't really like it either.  I think I was actually a little bored by it, if I'm being honest.  There were some wonderful lines, but overall, I didn't find the writing to be that extraordinary.  I think I'll need to try another one of Whitehead's books - I hear The Nickle Boys is good - before I cement my opinion.

So I'm not sure if I should recommend this one or not...  Make your own mind up!

But don't take my word for it...  Here's the blurb.

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.