RaveThe Spectator (UK)Whitehead’s Harlem, with its insalubrious tenements, poverty and drugs, is essentially that of Chester Himes, but he makes the territory his own, oscillating between the cerebral and the demotic. The novel works as both a hardboiled crime thriller and a period morality tale. Its prose mixes ebullient street vernacular with laconic descriptive passages and gnomic wisdom, and it has a positively Dickensian cast of assorted detritus ... Yet the true hero of this delicately nuanced, witty and emotionally complex tale is Harlem itself. The novel is not only a moving portrait of the district, for long the spiritual mecca of Black America, but also an elegy for it ... Set against the shifting tectonic plates of race, class and place, the book eloquently describes the hopes, dreams, fears and thwarted ambitions of black quotidian humanity, proffering profound insights into the human heart. It is about living in the shadow of one’s father, developing a moral compass of one’s own and learning to do the right thing. Given the social turbulence following the murder of George Floyd, with Harlem Shuffle Whitehead stakes a claim to be the storyteller America needs right now.
