PositiveLondon Review of Books (UK)While Harlem Shuffle is less devastating than Whitehead’s previous two novels...the Black struggle for civil and economic equality is no less present here ... Harlem Shuffle lacks the forcefulness of Whitehead’s two previous novels: there is nothing here to shock the way Fiona does in The Underground Railroad ... Perhaps too much is made of the heist, which comes to seem beside the point. And Whitehead’s freedom with pop culture references often comes back to bite him ... Still, there is a lot to be said for Whitehead’s depiction of Carney’s struggle. He is not a pioneer for social justice, or a poster child for the civil rights movement: he’s an ordinary and imperfect man constantly looking for a safer place to live, somewhere for his children to escape the fate of James Powell, or George Floyd, or Sandra Bland, or Trayvon Martin, or Breonna Taylor. But because in 1960s Harlem the odds were stacked so heavily against Black people, even if you weren’t a criminal yourself you risked being found guilty by association, or dragged down by those around you. These are working-class people, and the great-great grandchildren of the enslaved. Whitehead, as ever, is attentive to the subtle intersections Black men and women have to negotiate in their everyday working lives.
Brandon Taylor
PositiveLondon Review of Books (UK)Glints of humour provide occasional respite from the weightiness ... bristles with everyday microaggressions, all the myriad, annihilating ways blackness is weaponised. It’s a campus novel, but anyone familiar with 19th-century slave narratives will hear the tinkle of chains in the background. Taylor has written an economical, patient and incisive examination of race relations in present-day America.
