The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘I may be broke, but I ain’t crooked’
In Colson Whitehead’s civil-rights-era crime caper, Harlem’s hustlers are only looking out for themselves
336pp, Fleet, T £14.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £16.99, ebook £8.99
ÌÌÌÌÌ
Colson Whitehead is one of America’s most reliably unpredictable novelists. His 1999 debut The Intuitionists was a fantastical allegory set in the unlikely world of lift inspectors. Sag Harbour (2009) lovingly recreated the author’s upbringing among a rarely written about set: upper-class African Americans. Then he came out with a zombie novel. When Whitehead finally hit the big time (Oprah, Pulitzer, TV adaptation) with his 2016 slavery novel, The Underground Railroad, he put a sci-fi spin on a genre he had once parodied in a New York Times article as “the Southern Novel of Black Misery”. America’s still-festering racial wounds – not to mention the election of Donald Trump – then pushed Whitehead into writing The Nickel Boys, a harrowing tale of two black boys mistreated in a 1960s reform school.
Ever surprising, though, Whitehead’s new novel Harlem Shuffle is a crime novel set in New York that begins in the late 1950s. Though the moral drumbeat of the civil rights movement is always within earshot, the author prefers to dwell on an enclosed world of hustlers, crooks and brothels masquerading as bars. Its combination of vivid low-lifes and high moral conundrums is reminiscent of early Saul Bellow.
Our hero is furniture salesman Ray Carney, “a soft touch when it came to extensions and second chances”, who likes to reassure himself that “I may be broke, but I ain’t crooked”. You couldn’t say the same about his cousin Freddie. As a child, he roped Carney into being his lookout while he shoplifted comics. As an adult, he slips Carney the odd piece of jewellery or electronic appliance to sell in his store. But Freddie has bigger plans: robbing the Hotel Theresa – the Waldorf of Harlem – while the city’s wealthy celebrate Juneteenth. “The Italian Mafia did it to put us in our place,” the unsuspecting locals complain, but the real crew includes characters such as Miami Joe, who had “busted the colour line when it came to safes, and locks and alarms, generally regarded as the domain of white crooks”.
The novel’s three loosely connected sections take us up to the Harlem riots of 1964. Freddie, for one, is unimpressed by the new spirit of black protest: “The streets are full of people… Chanting ‘We want Malcolm X! We want Malcolm X!’… I’m hungry – I don’t want to deal with all that. I’m trying to get me a sandwich.” Carney, ever the pragmatist, thinks the riots are bad for business.
Whitehead clearly had a great time researching and writing this novel, which draws you in with its thickly textured details and largerthan-life characters. As a protagonist Carney has enough light and shade to keep him interesting, even if for large stretches he seems to disappear, even when present in the scene. There are excellent jokes studded throughout – Chet the Vet was never in Korea but trained to be an animal doctor (for a month). The dialogue is excellent, too.
Yet there is something missing from Whitehead’s wide repertoire of literary talents: the ability to construct a gripping plot. This was less of a problem in the nostalgic Sag Harbour or The Underground Railroad, with the inbuilt tension of its genre, but a crime novel needs more jeopardy than Whitehead is willing to provide. Much of the time he (and we) enjoy the back and forth of the crooks shooting the breeze, almost as if the author can’t bear to let them get to the action.
It’s likely this problem will be solved, though, when the screenwriters get hold of the book for its inevitable TV adaptation. (For some reason publishers are never as strict about pacing and plotting as TV producers are.) The setting and characters are all in place – though Carney’s wife Elizabeth will need fleshing out – and the lead could be played by, say, Clarke Peters of The Wire. With that final ingredient in place – the Harlem pack shuffled, as it were – it would be the kind of show that could run and run. Do check out the original, but don’t worry if you only catch it on Netflix.