Carney tries to distance himself from the shooting’s implications – he’s striving to land an account with a firm that’s avoided Black clients. The latter sections of the book turn on a 1964 Harlem riot provoked by a white police officer killing a Black teenager. Whitehead cannily parallels Carney’s fracture with his neighborhood’s. “More crooked in one direction and more legit in the other – careful you don’t split yourself in half,” Whitehead writes. Peace of mind – let alone sleep – is in short supply, and his lifestyle threatens to become unsustainable. He spends his days expanding the furniture business and nights serving as either Freddie’s accomplice or savior. It also tests his status as only slightly bent. That experience gives him a window into the corruption within New York’s Black and white neighborhoods, and how a Black businessman like himself is often shortchanged by it. 'Beautiful World, Where Are You': Sally Rooney finds meaning in sex, friendship as the world burnsīut Carney is soon roped into riskier schemes that put his and others’ lives at risk. Compared to others in Harlem, he figures he “was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked.” He’s certainly more upstanding, he’s sure, than his late criminal father, who left behind a stash of money that allowed Carney to launch his business. To get ahead, he secretly works a few illicit side hustles, like fencing jewelry for his cousin Freddie.

Its hero, Ray Carney, is a semi-successful Harlem furniture salesman.

Still, “Shuffle” aspires to be more than just a genre exercise. Whitehead has plainly had a good time conjuring up the two-fisted lines that punctuate the story: “He had pushed his luck and now luck’s opposite pushed back,” or “If being a crook were a crime, we’d all be in jail.” Set in the early 1960s, it’s an homage to the era’s hard-boiled crime writers like Chester Himes, Donald Westlake and Elmore Leonard. His latest, “Harlem Shuffle” (Doubleday, 336 pp., ★★★ out of four), is something of a retreat from the seriousness of his recent work. But it can also be a pigeonhole for a writer who’s built his work around everything from zombies to elevators to postage stamps. Merging stark takes on slavery and Jim Crow with a knack for plot twists, Whitehead has become the standard-bearer for racial reckoning in American fiction.

His 2016 novel, “ The Underground Railroad,” won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, and 2019’s “The Nickel Boys” won a Pulitzer as well. Williams, star of 'The Wire,' has died at 54Ĭolson Whitehead has had an unrivaled recent run as an author.

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