Pepper is as enigmatic and charismatic a crook as any in modern fiction. When a job goes sideways, Carney gets taken for a ride by the formidable Pepper, a cold, calculating enforcer who happens to have been one of Big Mike Carney’s old cronies. The turbulence of Carney’s childhood fuels his desire for the security and stability of the “straight” world. For Carney is the son of an infamous, long-deceased local hoodlum named Big Mike Carney, from whom he’s inherited a healthy sense of cunning. His worries are understandable that world destroyed his parents and made for a harrowing childhood. Carney is wary of the dangers, but his secret side hustle helps him pay the bills.

That network includes Carney’s erstwhile mentor, Harvey Moskowitz, his main contact in Manhattan’s Diamond District. Then there’s his beloved cousin Freddie, a lovable crook who’s as close to a brother as anyone in Carney’s life, and whose “common sense” tends “to fall out of a hole in his pocket-he never carried it long.”įrom the novel’s opening sentence (“His cousin Freddie brought him on the heist one hot night in early June”), Freddie draws Carney into shady dealings-moving stolen goods through a loose network of fences and pawnbrokers. Elizabeth works for a travel agency that specializes in planning Green Book-style itineraries that help Black travelers navigate the treacherous highways and byways of the segregated 1950s and 60s.

Carney is also a tender husband to his supportive pregnant wife Elizabeth and father to their young daughter Mary. Many of Carney’s clients struggle financially and fear shopping in white-owned stores where they might be denied service or otherwise humiliated. In his “straight” life, Carney is the owner and proprietor of Carney’s Furniture, which serves the neighborhood’s Black clientele by offering new and “gently used” furniture and appliances along with a forgiving policy on lines of credit. Set from 1959 to 1964, the novel comprises three episodes charting the precarious rise of Carney, a self-made man who habitually dips and sometimes dives into New York’s criminal underworld. 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. Colson Whitehead’s new novel, Harlem Shuffle, is the epic and captivating story of Ray Carney-furniture salesman, family man, entrepreneur on the rise and a vivid, walking, breathing, living exemplar of that classic archetype, the striver.

Harlem shuffle review