Harlem Shuffle (2021)
Whitehead’s latest book, just released in September, is a sweeping crime epic that’s already heralded as one of Whitehead’s greatest works, debuting at #3 on the New York Times Bestseller List.
The book follows Ray Carney, who lives an upstanding, straightforward life as a furniture salesman in Manhattan with his wife, Elizabeth. While Carney’s family was heavily involved in crime, he has resolved to live a decent life, only hustling as a fence for stolen goods to expand his own showroom. But when his cousin, Freddie, volunteers Carney as a fence for a heist that goes terribly wrong, Carney is drawn into the world of crime he’s mostly steered clear of, and must reconcile the criminal, devoted husband, and businessman sides of himself.
Written in small chunks over several years, and finally completed while Whitehead was isolated at home during the COVID-19 pandemic, Harlem Shuffle continues his recurring themes of race, social class, and power. Carney doesn’t really want to be a criminal — he’s just taking the only options he feels he has to rise above his criminal heritage. In relating that experience, Whitehead explained to Vulture that, “I was trying to capture the dynamism of the city. Harlem — before the Great Migration, before the influx of Caribbean immigrants in the ’20s — is a neighborhood of German, Italian, Irish, and Jewish people from all over the Earth. They came to America with nothing, and they entered the middle class and moved away, and then the next group came in. Maybe that’s Black Americans from the South, maybe it’s Black folks from Barbados and the West Indies, like my mom, like my grandmother was. She came through Ellis Island in the ’20s from Barbados. Harlem stays the same, but behind all that, the population in the townhouses, the people who own the streets and the buildings, is always turning. I definitely wanted to capture that. Then, of course, people rise up and down the economic ladder. Carney rises, and the people in Dumas Club have entered into the upper-middle class. It’s precarious because that’s the nature of Black success.”