Review of HARLEM SHUFFLE
Colson Whitehead finds his real voice? What a voice ...
A perfect title … but, maybe, if you only “listened” to it, as I did over the holidays. I very rarely use Audible. I get too easily distracted by what I am doing – including walking. Many close to me swear in it and I believe them, but I simply prefer to read than to listen. I may be revealing too much but there it is. As for Harlem Shuffle, I did read bits of it while listening in order to confirm that it might be as good in print as it is with the great voice of Dion Graham. It is.
Whitehead is a big writer in so many respects. His Underground Railroad is a brass ring of a book that is likely to be a part of our canon for a long time. His memoir about his youth in Sag Harbor is memoir at its best. I suspect he is a fearless writer since he jumps from one genre or pseudo genre to another without missing too many steps along the way. The truth about Harlem Shuffle, however, is that Whitehead may have found his natural style and voice in this nostalgic, timely, hilarious and poignant romp through mid-century Harlem. There are riots in the background. Drugs are beginning to wreck the neighborhood while civil liberation is rumbling on the horizon. However, Harlem is very much black and everything “downtown” is white. The police are not to be trusted and your best friends are too often crooked. Whitehead’s descriptions are Dickensian as are his characters. The dialogue is whip smart and funny. What is unsaid crackles behind each sarcastic or laconic aside. The crimes are big and petty, and the plot feels Raymond Chandleresque as it flirts with too much confusion and too many subplots. However, like Marlowe holding together Chandler’s Los Angeles, the narrator Carney does so in this equally evocative Harlem. Carney ruminations, his past, his predicaments, his relatives and his fabulous furniture store serve as the gravitational center for this, at times, madcap shuffle through a Harlem that is slowly coming apart just as the world begins to change the meaning of being black in America. And it is here that the book connects at another level.
The timeless themes of truth, safety, family and loyalty play themselves out amidst an endearing cast of thieves, murderers and corrupt policemen. As a privileged white reader, I marveled at a people constantly under the boot of a mostly invisible but omnipresent oppressor. I kept wondering whose the richer life was. Not along the measurement of safety, health and opportunity – that is clear and obvious. But, rather, along the lines of the “shuffle” required to survive versus the straight lines and buttoned up world of “downtown”. I have always suspected that much of white racism is rooted in the spirit and character it took to survive as a black person in this country. The longer the survival, the more extraordinary the shuffle, the more envy in those in charge. It is a cycle I believe is alive and well today. Read this great book and you’ll feel it. Especially if you listen to it …
Harlem Shuffle
Colson Whitehead (2021)
336 pages