Whitehead’s own mind has famously gone thataway through nine other books that don’t much resemble one another, but this time he’s hit upon a setup that will stick. He has said he may keep Ray going into another book, and it won’t take you long to figure out why ... brings Whitehead’s unwavering eloquence to a mix of city history, niche hangouts, racial stratification, high hopes and low individuals. All of these are somehow worked into a rich, wild book that could pass for genre fiction. It’s much more, but the entertainment value alone should ensure it the same kind of popular success that greeted his last two novels. It reads like a book whose author thoroughly enjoyed what he was doing ... The author creates a steady, suspenseful churn of events that almost forces his characters to do what they do. The final choice is theirs, of course ... Quaint details aside, this is no period piece ... Though it’s a slightly slow starter, Harlem Shuffle has dialogue that crackles, a final third that nearly explodes, hangouts that invite even if they’re Chock Full o’ Nuts and characters you won’t forget even if they don’t stick around for more than a few pages.
... dazzling ... the language here is wiseguy crisp, zinging with street vernacular ... Whitehead flexes his literary muscles further, extending the boundaries and expectations of crime writing ... The book is also a social drama interrogating the nature of prejudice and how an environment limits ambition. The nuances of Manhattan’s topography drive much of the action ... Part of the book’s pleasure is that it keeps you guessing. By the end, I felt, as Ray does of Harlem: 'Its effect was unmeasurable until it was gone.'
... a book that luxuriates in the seedy spaces of late night ... this book too is driven by a serious historical purpose, showing us the micro-changes in the landscape of Harlem and the prospects of Black Americans in the North in the 1960s .. Whitehead’s sweet, sweaty, authoritative, densely peopled portrait of a Harlem in near perpetual summer is the most successful part of the book. Had I not known Whitehead was a talented shape-shifter, I — as an outsider to Harlem — would have believed he had only ever written about this setting ... Except for a couple of potted histories, Whitehead’s research in Harlem Shuffle feels richly integrated with the story; he knows the people of Harlem in the 1960s; and the people are just that: real people ... In the past, Whitehead has shown a deep interest in systems but not always in human psychology (a charge that has also been leveled at earlier systems novelists like Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon). This book is a step forward. Ray Carney, the protagonist, is, in some ways, Whitehead’s most fully developed character ... The novel treats the hotel itself as a microcosm of Harlem, and each civilian caught in the heist is tagged with a supple biography. Had Whitehead ended the book after this fierce and funny section, it would stand as one of the few perfect novellas in American literature ... Unfortunately — or fortunately, depending on your taste — Whitehead keeps going; and the rest of the book yields mixed results ... this revenge goes perfectly, with few consequences for Carney — and the book loses energy as a result. Instead of forcing Carney’s self-image into crisis, Whitehead gives us less-than-original observations about how everyone’s a crook ... Happily, Whitehead rights the ship by the third episode, which focuses on another crime to which Carney is an unwilling accomplice, with potentially deadly repercussions for the people he loves. And the crime story, which had become inert, suddenly revs to life, reminding us that Whitehead, beneath all the shambling and high jinks, remains an American master.
The book might be called 'Colson Comes to Harlem,' because in bringing his singular gifts to this storied place, the novelist turns to the crime genre ... In his eminently enjoyable new novel, Mr. Whitehead’s various powers have attained something like equilibrium. The humor and flashes of the old word-wizardry are there, as is the philosophical subtext; race, while not foregrounded the way it is in The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, is woven inextricably into the background, like subtle but effective film music; and we are made to care about, and root for, the main character ... In telling Carney’s story, Mr. Whitehead comes off a bit like the onetime class clown who has matured enough to realize that jokes will not carry him through every situation, even as he is sometimes unable to resist making them.
One of Harlem Shuffle’s quiet strengths is its fine gradings of the distinctions between selectively deaf complicity and overt criminality. Over the course of the novel’s three long parts, which span the five years between the Theresa heist and the Harlem riots of 1964, Carney is drawn ever deeper into the underworld ... It is in this social-realist mode that Harlem Shuffle most effectively frees itself from the constraints of the crime thriller; or, rather, uses those constraints to advance a vision of America beyond genre, each stick-up and swindle and shakedown a local instance of the general condition, which Whitehead diagnoses as a culture of stupendous, and interdependent, enterprise and violence ... On the other hand, constraints are sometimes just constraints, and the off-the-shelf elements – the overheated streets, the stock mobsters in their lurid suits, the evil plutocrat at the top of the criminal hierarchy – serve only to undermine the novel’s social-historical sweep. This might matter less in a faster-footed novel, but in Harlem Shuffle the telling is hampered by a narrative device that has served Whitehead better in the past ... In Harlem Shuffle the effect of Whitehead’s tendency to fall back and fill in is more obstructive, a buffering wheel just when things are getting exciting ... Such lapses are all the more frustrating given the vividness on display elsewhere ... When Harlem Shuffle springs to life, it does so with a controlled intensity that resonates beyond the immediate events of the novel.
... a casual, beautiful novel, extraordinarily enjoyable ... In the less successful of Whitehead’s early books, there was a stubborn emotional remove in even overtly emotional passages, the language and thought always crystalline, the author’s gifts never in question, but the heartbeat thready. Not in Harlem Shuffle ... Maybe it’s this that writing historical fiction has given Whitehead: the ability to command a fuller and more fine-grain range of human emotions, granted to him in part by the safety of characters firmly embedded in other eras, away from himself. Some writers flourish in that freedom ... feels very much a part of Whitehead’s great and complex project (intentional or not) in this second phase of his career to write about Black history in America with the fullness of attention and empathy that white Americans have taken for granted ... it’s the in-between shades of racism, as much as the ones most glaringly relevant, that Whitehead captures most masterfully through Ray—the thousands of apperceptions of insult both subtle and blatant, the unending accumulation of slights, that comprised life as a Black person in the 50s and 60s ... The book’s three plotlines, each revolving around a crime, are engaging and well constructed, if perhaps a little perfunctory...They could be peak Elmore Leonard, with their episodes of semi-violence and moral ambiguity...But Ray is a character strong and central enough to override these faults in the narrative ... funny, rich, hugely pleasurable.
Whitehead has designed the book to fold out...with symmetrical beauty ... Like a dealer in Three-card Monte, the author shows, shuffles, and overlaps these plots, daring you to enter the gambit ... I’ll point you to the closing pages of the novel where Whitehead, with dazzling skill, shows us that his crime fiction was never meant to be a lark ... The continually fluctuating conditions of Black American life; the WTC rising and crumbling at once. The author captures six decades of American experience in Carney’s glance ... linguistic prowess, formal precision, and electric imagination. Those very elements also make Harlem Shuffle exciting and wise.
A heist with a cast of zany characters, tongue-in-cheek dialogue, questionable criminal skills, and of course, a bumbling, incompetent thief or two are undoubtedly part of the charm of Colson Whitehead's Harlem Shuffle. But the novel is also a powerful tale of a man's love for his family and the neighborhood where he lives. And the man at the center of that tale is a devastatingly enjoyable character who has a true gift for words — if not always the smartest actions ... I especially enjoyed Whitehead's prose, so vividly cinematic it brought to mind some of my favorite gritty heist films ... every paragraph is full of authentic voices and perfectly deployed profanity, which adds to the you-are-there feeling, sitting in the backroom of the furniture store or at the bar at the Nightbirds with Carney, Freddie, Miami Joe, Pepper and Tommy Lips. There are some riveting female characters, too ... No matter how much trouble he finds, we can't help but root for Ray Carney every step of the way ... a suspenseful crime thriller that's sure to add to the tally — it's a fabulous novel you must read.
Colson Whitehead is one of the most talented storytellers in contemporary fiction, and watching him switch his approach and flex new muscles is a wildly entertaining reading experience ... Harlem Shuffle is a funny, violent novel that doubles as a love letter to New York City’s seedy underbelly and the plethora of characters that made it unique ... The first standout element in this novel is its structure. More than a classic narrative with an inciting incident, Whitehead wrote what feels like three or four novellas seamlessly woven together by the same characters, with Carney always the epicenter ... Ray Carney is a memorable character whose struggles are universal even if his reasons for doing what he does are unique ... Harlem Shuffle is painfully accurate and wonderfully unapologetic in its presentation of racism ... Harlem Shuffle is memorable because of the way it brings together a family saga, a heist novel, and a superb, meticulously researched depiction of street life in 1960s Harlem. However, Ray Carney is what most readers will remember the most ... Colson Whitehead is an outstanding chronicler of our times who also has a knack for bringing the past to the page with incredible clarity, and Harlem Shuffle proves that once again.
[A] brilliant crime novel that doubles as a meditation on the nature of black geography ... So careful is Whitehead’s mapping that the novel could double as a script for a walking tour of Harlem ... The brilliance of Harlem Shuffle is the way it yanks readers down from the top of the tour bus, away from the high-gloss clubs and cabarets that lured visitors uptown, and on to the sweltering pavement ... Whitehead leaves us with the notion that to map Harlem is to follow the perpetually changing routes of its makers and takers.
As a crime caper (with a revenge plot thrown in) Harlem Shuffle is masterfully crafted; you can’t always tell where it’s going to go. Those moments when you can – when a scene or chapter wraps up a little too neatly, where a wisecrack is a little too wise – are few and far between and at the very least show the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner allowing himself to have a little fun. The heist itself is an flawless setpiece and, although it gets off to a slow start, the book as a whole rattles along like an El train fuelled by street talk and shop floor patter. Just like the masters of the hard-boiled novels he’s clearly been reading, Whitehead is a great riffer and one who can play by ear. He sticks closely to Carney but he also easily slips into other people’s skins and speech. It feels as though all the characters, no matter how tangential to the plot, are given their narrative due; all the lost souls and nightowls seen or heard ... But what really sets Harlem Shuffle out from the crowded market of genre fiction and marks it out as distinctly Whiteheadian (has he earned his own adjective?) is its sense of the larger structures its characters shift in, or else are stuck in.
Whitehead offers a literary crime saga that is as delicious as it is nutritious, a much lighter meal than his previous two novels, which emerge from the real-life atrocities of slavery and a brutal reform school in the American south. Whether in high literary form or entertaining, page-turner mode, the man is simply incapable of writing a bad book ... an extraordinary story about an ordinary man ... The ordinary-Joe-furniture-salesman aspect of Carney’s life gets restated a touch too much in the novel, as do his sleepless nights spent in worry, though, understandably, the novel’s premise hangs on his double life. The pleasure of the plot lies in discovering what kind of trouble an ordinary man can get into, and how or whether he’ll get out. Crime novels risk becoming formulaic, like action movies. While there aren’t any car chases or Tarantino-style fight scenes in Harlem Shuffle, Whitehead capably fulfils the genre’s expectations while gently parodying them ... The three acts could make satisfying novellas on their own, but they’re better together. The novel gains force through accumulation and acceleration – brake and gas, gas and brake, until we are far from where we started. In one or two sentences at the end of a chapter, Whitehead can change the book’s whole trajectory ... Set 60 years ago, the novel nonetheless has a number of parallels to our time ... Thankfully, Whitehead is never sermonising or sentimental ... yet another novel that New Yorkers are going to lovingly claim ... If Harlem Shuffle is your introduction to Whitehead, you’ll discover a writer with range. Without being pretentious or phony, he can use a verb like bivouac then convincingly switch registers ... Whitehead counterbalances humour with insight ... you’ll discover a tenderness beneath the swagger. Whitehead draws his roster of secondary characters, especially the ones that could easily become stock figures such as crime bosses and petty thieves, with as much care as the primary ones. His portraits are never mean-spirited; instead, Whitehead renders the humanity of hustlers. He gets their sweetness down.
Like Dante leading us through the levels of hell, Whitehead presents the reader with the levels of rottenness in early to mid-1960s New York City ... yet another Colson Whitehead masterpiece.
His enthralling, cinematic new work...tweaks a simple heist story to limn enduring conflicts of race and class ... Whitehead's sentences are beautifully bricked together—it's nigh impossible to wedge a blade between them—and his midcentury deadpan is flawless. But there's a touch of Renaissance storytelling, as well ... While a valentine to a time and place, Harlem Shuffle brilliantly tackles the daunting challenges of any American era.
Harlem Shuffle is a bravura performance, an immersive, laugh-out-loud, riveting adventure whose narrative energy is boosted by its memorable hero and a highly relevant backdrop of social injustice ... Whitehead conveys the violence on the other side of civility ... Even while using the law-abiding and criminal worlds as counterfoils, Whitehead shows how much they overlap in their shared desire for opportunity, security, safety, and a fair shake. His love for his characters and for the Harlem of Harlem Shuffle is clear. In this brilliant novel Whitehead has woven a rich tapestry with resonant characters and relationships, a playful, memorable lyricism, and a hero for the ages.
The murky distinction between legality and illegality sits at the core of Harlem Shuffle … Can theft really be a crime, the novel asks us, in a country built on it? … Frustratingly, Ray...remains a pragmatist, never fully disavowing the charms of the Black bourgeoisie—a choice that is of course his right, just as it is Whitehead’s to write a novel devoid of prescriptions. In fact, his refusal might even be considered radical at a moment when readers are turning to Black writers for answers rather than for art. Whitehead follows in a long tradition of Black writers who employ crime fiction subversively, using the genre against itself to expose the hypocrisies of the justice system … Some readers may find the absence of a real police presence in the novel a missed opportunity for social commentary, but others—I’m among them—can appreciate that Whitehead’s omission allows the people in his book to savor the delight that transgression bring … Few of his crooks get off entirely free (the gangsters and the businessmen they represent eventually come knocking). Still, many are given a brief moment to revel in the high of the heist, which is close enough.
... a crime novel of sorts that offers a vivid look at the Harlem of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. It’s got potboiler DNA, packed with capers and unsavory elements, but all of it is informed by the narrative brilliance of the author. The result is a wild ride of a novel, one that focuses on one man’s inner struggle with his past and present, wherein he seeks to do right by his family while also being the man he wants to be ... plenty sophisticated and carries forward many of the themes Whitehead traditionally explores in his work, but Harlem Shuffle is a looser read, content to lean into the narrative and let the story be what it will be. And what it will be is outstanding ... probably won’t be Colson Whitehead’s third straight Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. That likelihood doesn’t change the underlying truth – that this book is fantastic. This is the work of a man who loves and respects the possibilities presented by genre, a man who is unafraid to tell the stories he wants to tell in the manner in which he wants to tell them.
Harlem Shuffle is filled with shady but relatable characters ... Throughout the narrative, Whitehead brings the neighbourhoods and people of Harlem in the early 1960s to life. He paints a vivid picture of the city from the shops to the diners and the clubs ... While Whitehead may be a little more laid back in Harlem Shuffle, and revels in the tropes of the crime genre, this only serves to make his underlying commentary stand out more ... He delivers both an engaging and tense crime narrative while also bringing to life a time and place. But more than that, Whitehead continues to use his stories to highlight the historical and ongoing challenges faced by Black communities in America. To once again make the point that no matter how far that society has come towards righting the wrongs of the past, there is still a long way to go.
Harlem Shuffle once again shows off Colson Whitehead's ability to master myriad genres ... Whitehead confidently crafts a pressure-cooker novel ... Harlem Shuffle makes excellent use of time-honored techniques, piling problem upon problem onto Ray's shoulders. For readers, Ray's constant balancing over the abyss makes for a gripping story, as lovingly detailed as it is good pulpy fun.
... full of deadpan humor and side-eyed satire, looking most like crime fiction but — of course — full of other surprises ... Whitehead populates Harlem Shuffle with a cast of rowdy characters, most of whom he treats with tenderness ... the book focuses warmly on its characters’ daily lives and on the place where they live. Rich with affectionate detail, it’s as much a love song to Harlem as a shuffle. Just as a lover strives to understand his beloved, ever fascinated, Ray can always be dazzled by his city.
... a work that has a certain joy and a deep melancholy ... This is a very good thriller and so much more than a thriller. As with Colson’s previous work, this deals with race. But he does not deal with it in a simple, dichotomous way ... The subtlety of Carney’s character is key to this novel. External either/or-s plague him. The competing claims of loyalty and propriety, aspiration and anonymity, grift and grit run through the book on every level. It makes the reader wonder the whole time about the extent of sympathy to extend. This is a rare quality, to keep you double-guessing about how we are going to judge the character. It is also a moral proposition, which is rare in contemporary fiction.
If the ghost of Chester Himes hovers over these pages, there’s nothing derivative about Whitehead’s storytelling. As usual, when he moves into a new genre, he keeps the bones but does his own decorating ... There’s nothing zany about Harlem Shuffle, but Whitehead has cast this novel with toughs like Chet the Vet, who flashes gold canines, and Miami Joe, who wears a high-waisted purple suit. Although they’re not harmless figures, they’re definitely comic/
Harlem Shuffle is true to its form: gangster fans will hear the rhymes with The Roaring Twenties and Mean Streets—buddies who find themselves on plot-generating divergent paths, marked with themes of loyalty and betrayal ... Whitehead...is as scathing about black gentility and snobbery here as he was in John Henry Days (the Encyclopaedic one, by the way), with another angle to the critique. In Harlem Shuffle, they’re not only emotionally repressive, but another racket: black capitalism turns out to be black people ripping off other black people. It is a bit of a flaw that Ray’s in-laws are more vividly drawn than his wife. Whitehead makes sure that Elizabeth doesn’t exist simply in relation to Ray: she works for a travel agent, booking her clients into non-restricted hotels, and later organising accommodation for civil rights activists. All this means, though, is that she’s largely just a conduit for the Broader Historical Background. And as far as her relation to Ray goes, she is the one from whom everything must be hidden, and also the one whose worldly acumen doesn’t extend to getting wise to her husband’s double life ... Harlem Shuffle isn’t stark, and doesn’t lack for wit—it’s made for pleasure—though the prose is still lean compared with some of the earlier work: it won’t provide resistance to anyone seeking the bingeworthy excitements that Whitehead is as good at as he is at everything else he does.
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.
... gloriously entertaining ... In archly comic prose...Colson conjures Kennedy-era New York in all its tatterdemalion glory ... Colson remains one of the most eclectic writers at work in the US today. The influence of caper films such as Rififi and Uncut Gems shows in the dark comedy attendant on the Theresa venture, but Colson is his own sardonic, street-savvy voice ... Colson’s is not an overtly political voice, but Harlem Shuffle is a zingy social drama, that combines flights of high comedy with reflections on the nature of black self-help and black empowerment in America. A more purely enjoyable novel is unlikely to emerge this year.
[A] captivating crime novel from two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Colson Whitehead, renders 1960s Harlem in vivid and evocative detail, simmering with race and class tension and teeming with corruption and vice ... Harlem Shuffle also presents a compelling family story, riven by class stratification ... With Harlem Shuffle’s hard-boiled bent, Whitehead adroitly sidesteps comparisons to his two back-to-back Pulitzer Prize winners ... Harlem Shuffle does deliver, again and again, the incisive and mordant humor found in nearly all of Whitehead’s books.
... a substantial stylistic change ... Harlem Shuffle is far more discreet [than Whitehead's last novel] as the New York racism of the post-Korean War era is illustrated more through subtle comments, gestures and attitudes that seemingly recognize that the United States and the rest of the world are changing, but not without some pushback from those in authority ... Ray Carney is a wonderfully sympathetic character. We want him to succeed, and we worry that his life, business and family could be destroyed by white New York society ... [a] delightful and amazing book[.]
It’s not rippling with Paul Beatty or Joseph Heller belly laughs, but Harlem Shuffle is notably more playful than its heavyweight predecessors ... Along the way Whitehead documents the neighbourhood changes and losses with a nostalgic melancholy, walking the reader along the razed blocks, burnt-out shop fronts and faded street signs ... the real draw of this novel is its loving evocation of the sounds, smells and flavours of ‘60s Harlem ... Whitehead’s almost pathological need to thoroughly describe every passing jaywalker or shop window is akin to that of unlikely bedfellow Thomas Hardy ... We negotiate the ‘sidewalk choreography’ of men in pinstripe suits side-stepping soul-saving street preachers. And when it’s all over and we look up from the page again, the real world looks a little more grey than it did before.
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.
This is so much fun. Mortal peril, race riots, seriously nasty criminals, the hot and sweaty streets of Harlem in the 1960s and a furniture salesman who has a hell of a lot going on ... Colson Whitehead puts so many beautiful thoughts on each page of his gentle, considered prose and brings New York and its people to glorious life.
There is violence and grimness, to be sure, but they are undercut here by the drollness and irony that is emblematic of Whitehead’s earlier works, qualities that he could not readily avail himself of in his two previous books’ representations of enslavement and the institutional abuse of children. There’s an unmistakable wryness to much of the dialogue ... The prose glistens most dazzlingly as Carney peregrinates around the neighborhood ... The conviviality of Harlem, brimming with life and sin of all kinds, produces characters who are almost too human—that is, complex and contradictory in the most mundane but familiar ways ... If crime novels of the early- and mid-twentieth century often provided a glimpse inside the psychology of the criminal, Harlem Shuffle evinces how such a psychology could come into vogue ... By making the novel’s protagonist a self-described entrepreneur who unyieldingly rails against the lawless behavior he so regularly partakes in, Whitehead reveals how structural racism, interpersonal anti-Blackness, and the fantasy of the American dream co-conspire under capitalism, undermining Black community by atomizing success into an individual aspiration and achievement rather than a collective possibility.
Perhaps owing to the limitations and tropes of its genre conceit – the caper novel has a much larger history in the United States – Harlem Shuffle, I confess, did little for me. Whitehead’s typically fizzy writing aside, the novel’s narrative, though diverting and amiable enough, is somewhat programmatic and workmanlike in its execution. A commentary on class, disillusionment and ways of moving up in the world, Harlem Shuffle is as idiosyncratic in its neo-noir fascinations as Whitehead’s debut.
Whitehead, as ever, has a photographic eye for the particulars of the city and its moment in time. We know every inch of his furniture showroom, as well as his troubled psyche. At times, though, it feels as overburdened by its balancing act as Carney does. Shuffle often lacks the efficiency of his noir inspirations—the descriptions can be dense, the plotting convoluted. But the story flies when it focuses on Carney’s split personality. He’s both an engrossing character and a compelling allegory for the ways a city—and country—are divided yet interlaced, both 'separate and connected by tracks.'
The handmade quality to Carney ('still spackling himself into something presentable') makes him an ideal protagonist. He is our point of entry into the striving American national soul, occupying a netherworld between crooked and straight ... Whitehead makes Carney so lovable and believably good that all my sympathies swayed his way. How could this person with the steady humor and outsized heart bring so much trouble on himself?
Whitehead makes his foray into crime fiction, to transportive effect ... The author’s crisp prose rounds the many narrative curves ... A meticulous researcher, Whitehead re-creates the Harlem of the late 1950s and early 1960s through sights and sounds ... What most grounds the novel in its setting, perhaps more than the rich historical details, are the characters ... It is, in many ways, a very American story ... With his latest successful genre exercise, Whitehead questions all manner of strivers, even the likable ones who seem to 'deserve' more. In Harlem Shuffle, upward mobility is a means, not an end, and legitimacy a matter of perspective.
... a stylish, urbane take on hard-boiled crime fiction in the vein of American novelists Cornell Woolrich or W.R. Burnett ... If there is a weak part to this story, it is the bond between Carney and Freddie, upon which much of the plot hinges, but which never feels convincing enough to warrant the risks Carney takes for his cousin. One is easily distracted from this, however, by the novel's colourful cast ... The way Whitehead maps the chameleonic, changing networks of the city onto the psyche of his ambitious protagonist is nothing short of masterful.
... a wildly entertaining romp. But as you might expect with this two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and MacArthur genius, Whitehead also delivers a devastating, historically grounded indictment of the separate and unequal lives of Blacks and whites in mid-20th century New York ... the plot is twisty, with a large, at times bewildering cast of characters and a few storylines that border on the ridiculous. What ties it all is the utterly believable, complicated character of Carney ... Part of the suspense—and what sets this novel apart from so many others in the hard-boiled crime genre—comes from wondering whether Ray’s better angels will prevail ... countless beautifully written, erudite passages ... Whitehead takes us inside Ray’s head as he considers the relationship between fathers and sons, and the question of whether genetics is destiny.
We have here the family-man-turned-criminal dynamic of TV’s Breaking Bad combined with the antiques scam of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, filtered through crime novelists such as Elmore Leonard and Chester Himes, who wrote hard-boiled tales of Harlem street life in the 1960s ... It may lack the tension and unease of the previous two novels — and it occasionally succumbs to repetition and over-explanation — but Harlem Shuffle is funnier and more relaxed in tone, never more alive than when the characters are in conversation. Midcentury New York City provides Whitehead with a rich seam of material ... Within the morality tale about a good man dragged into the underworld, there lurk still darker accounts of broken lives, which capture the longing for dignity and agency at the heart of the black American experience. It’s a red-blooded book full of powerful personalities and worldly wisdom.
In the hands of Whitehead, Harlem is a stunning motif representing a cultural mecca of intellect, art, and business ... Whitehead skillfully weaves a complex tapestry of Harlem’s racial issues ... Harlem Shuffle exudes authorial power and profound insight into the American experiment. In this multi-layered crime narrative, Whitehead presents complex characters who embody the complexity of their social milieu. Like America, Harlem’s stratified beauty is symbolic of the constant tension between those who are corrupt and those who are trying to lead a respectable existence. Ultimately, the power of Whitehead’s mixed-genre narrative is his exploration and insight into the duplicitous mindset of the American consciousness.
That title cries out to be turned into a sexy, pacey movie, but the book isn’t actually a thriller. If only it were ... Whitehead gives us the bare outlines of a potboiler with the laboured prose of a middling literary novel. The two ingredients sit awkwardly side by side ... just mundane slabs of prose that wander nowhere in particular ... the writing is so oddly flat, alternating between a bloodless formality and interjections of what passes for jive talk. Sometimes it just sounds like a caption in a Victorian penny dreadful ... it’s difficult to take much interest in what happens, or to follow the comings and goings of small-time crooks who go by names such as Biz Dixon and Bumpy Johnson. Actual Harlem celebrities are glimpsed in the background — Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington and the firebrand congressman Adam Clayton Powell all get a mention. Yet the neighbourhood that Himes and the Jamaican-born novelist Claude McKay brought so memorably to life ultimately seems as one-dimensional as, well, the Hamptons.
Whitehead has fun and shows off his literary dexterity with this rollicking crime novel set in 1960s Harlem ... As a writer, Whitehead is in full command, seamlessly populating his story with lovingly recounted period details. The stakes here aren’t as high, or the subject matter as heavy, as in his two recent masterworks, but Whitehead’s mystery explores the intersections of Black class mobility, civil unrest, and New York City in an entertaining way ... Another can’t-miss from the versatile Whitehead.
Whitehead adds another genre to an ever-diversifying portfolio with his first crime novel, and it’s a corker ... Whitehead delivers a portrait of Harlem in the early ’60s, culminating with the Harlem Riot of 1964, that is brushed with lovingly etched detail and features a wonderful panoply of characters who spring to full-bodied life, blending joy, humor, and tragedy. A triumph on every level.
Throughout, readers will be captivated by a Dickensian array of colorful, idiosyncratic characters, from itchy-fingered gangsters to working-class women with a low threshold for male folly. What’s even more impressive is Whitehead’s densely layered, intricately woven rendering of New York City in the Kennedy era, a time filled with both the bright promise of greater economic opportunity and looming despair due to the growing heroin plague ... As one of Whitehead’s characters might say of their creator, When you’re hot, you’re hot.
... a sizzling heist novel ... It’s a superlative story, but the most impressive achievement is Whitehead’s loving depiction of a Harlem 60 years gone—'that rustling, keening thing of people and concrete'—which lands as detailed and vivid as Joyce’s Dublin. Don’t be surprised if this one wins Whitehead another major award.
