Book review: Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead

By Simon Demetriou

Like all good crime fiction, Colson Whitehead’s eighth novel is concerned with things that are hidden in more or less plain sight. But where the crime fiction that defined the genre – think Chandler and Hammett – looked behind facades, Whitehead’s modern reimagining of the genre goes deeper. Take the presentation of the novel’s setting, New York City: we have straight New York and crooked New York, white New York and black New York. Within crooked New York, there is the crookedness of the wealthy white elites, ‘people who were as bent as gangsters but didn’t have to hide’, the crookedness of Harlem’s black underworld, represented by Big Mike Carney – the dead father of the novel’s protagonist, Ray Carney – and the crookedness of the black Harlem elite who gather at the swanky Dumas Club to carry out their shady transactions.

That Mike Carney is a significant figure in the novel, despite being dead long before it begins in the summer of 1959, is another indication of the way in which Whitehead explores the inner fragmentation of what outwardly looks like an individual whole. Ray Carney is a happily married furniture salesman. Ray Carney also becomes one of Harlem’s leading ‘fences’ (middlemen in the recirculation of stolen goods) after his ne’er-do-well cousin Freddie drags Ray into the jewel heist that forms the central action of the opening section of the novel. In the end, we are told that Ray’s crookedness is nothing to wonder at; it has simply been passed down to him from Big Mike. Tying Carney senior and junior together is not just criminality, but its most dynamic and problematic representative, Pepper: erstwhile associate of Big Mike Carney, current associate of Ray Carney, an artist of pain who you cannot help but sympathise with, and perhaps Whitehead’s greatest achievement in this novel.

Thus, just as the crooked and the straight are indivisible, so is the past and the present, the black and the white, the rich and the poor, the good and the bad. And in one sense, this is the novel’s strength; there is power in Carney’s conclusion that ultimately ‘the wall between you and everybody else was thin enough to punch through’. But it is also its weakness, because in the mid-section of the novel, Whitehead veers too far towards elaborating the universality of crookedness, at the cost of the dramatic pace and force that make the first and third parts of the story so engaging. This is the price of the author’s ambition in applying a contemporary naturalistic sensibility to a genre in which pace and style were traditionally used to avoid the reader worrying too much about why things happened. For this reader, at any rate, it is a price worth paying.