Harlem Shuffle

 

Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was a great look into Harlem in the 50s and 60s. Ray is a furniture salesman and if he sort of knowingly sells questionable goods his cousin procures for him, well, that's just good business. Things get complicated when his cousin starts involving him more. The divide between the strivers and crooks that used to look so black and white gets blurred closer together throughout the book as the hot summers swelter and Ray is drawn deeper into his cousin's world. I loved Ray's character as well as several of the supporting members (Pepper). His rationalizations and ability to almost divide himself in two are relatable, comedic, and tragic. This is definitely one of the lighter pieces I've read by Whitehead but I enjoyed it all the more for that. The fact that somehow Ray always lands on his feet makes it that much more endearing. Beautiful, beautiful writing--each chapter was its own poem, opus, showpiece. Whitehead has all my respect and awe.

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Carney took the previous tenants' busted schemes and failed dreams as a kind of fertilizer that helped his own ambitions prosper, the same way a fallen oak in its decomposition nourishes the acorn.

Strivers grasped for something better--maybe it existed, make it didn't--and crooks schemed about how to manipulate the present system.  The world as it might be versus the world as it was.   

Plenty of crooks were strivers, and plenty of strivers bent the law.

The heat made Harlem into a forge.  Pepper rode shotgun.

If their words hadn't wakened Elizabeth, then she was asleep for the night, arms reaching out for May, with that new baby in between.  Carney split.

The British called this wakeful interval the watch, Professor Simonov explained, and in France it went by dorvay.  You went over your accounts, whatever they may be--reading, praying, lovemaking, attending to pressing work, or overdue leisure.   It was a respite from the normal world and its demands, a holoow of private enterprise carved out of lost hours.

dorvay was crooked heaven, when the straight world slept and the bent got to work.

Part of moving up in the world is realizing how much shit you used to eat.

Look at it from one way, it was not a place for an angel, look at it from another and maybe it was a place that needed an angel.  And another view was that if it were beautiful, it wouldn't last long there.