Ray Carney is a man perpetually caught in the middle. As a Black business owner in Harlem he is a fixture in his community, but he has a hard time getting white-owned companies to do business with him. As a dark-skinned Black man he faces colorism from the affluent section of Harlem, including his own in-laws. And as the son of a career criminal, he finds himself struggling to escape from his father’s past while inexorably drawn back into it by his father’s old associates […]

My book club is a fan of Colson Whitehead. We read The Intuitionist (a beautifully odd book about elevator inspectors which I loved) several years ago, then The Underground Railroad (also very good, and the winner of many awards) when he came to speak at a university in city our city. We may have fangirled and fanboyed out a little in the signing line afterward. I had a library copy of his book, which he signed. Hopefully someone smiled after they checked it out after […]

Harlem Shuffle was billed as a heist book, a caper. And it certainly has heists, and even a caper or two, but reducing the whole book to that label ignores that Harlem Shuffle is something a bit more complex. Ray Carney is a furniture salesman in Harlem in the late 1950s. He is moderately successful, still worried about making rent. He dreams of a bigger apartment for his growing family. He is also, we soon learn, not entirely on the up-and-up. In a description reminiscent […]