Harlem Shuffle | Whitehead, Colson

Lange Beschreibung
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, this gloriously entertaining novel is fast-paced, keen-eyed and very funny ... about race, power and the history of Harlem all disguised as a thrill-ride crime novel' (San Francisco Chronicle).

'Ray Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked...' To his customers and neighbors on 125th street, Carney is an upstanding salesman of reasonably priced furniture, making a decent life for himself and his family. He and his wife Elizabeth are expecting their second child, and if her parents on Striver's Row don't approve of him or their cramped apartment across from the subway tracks, it's still home. 

Few people know he descends from a line of uptown hoods and crooks, and that his façade of normalcy has more than a few cracks in it. Cracks that are getting bigger all the time. 

Cash is tight, especially with all those installment-plan sofas, so if his cousin Freddie occasionally drops off the odd ring or necklace, Ray doesn't ask where it comes from. He knows a discreet jeweler downtown who doesn't ask questions, either. 

Then Freddie falls in with a crew who plan to rob the Hotel Theresa the 'Waldorf of Harlem' and volunteers Ray's services as the fence. The heist doesn't go as planned; they rarely do. Now Ray has a new clientele, one made up of shady cops, vicious local gangsters, two-bit pornographers, and other assorted Harlem lowlifes. 

Thus begins the internal tussle between Ray the striver and Ray the crook. As Ray navigates this double life, he begins to see who actually pulls the strings in Harlem. Can Ray avoid getting killed, save his cousin, and grab his share of the big score, all while maintaining his reputation as the go-to source for all your quality home furniture needs? 

Harlem Shuffle's ingenious story plays out in a beautifully recreated New York City of the early 1960s. It's a family saga masquerading as a crime novel, a hilarious morality play, a social novel about race and power, and ultimately a love letter to Harlem. 

But mostly, it's a joy to read, another dazzling novel from the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning Colson Whitehead.

Look for Colson Whitehead s new novel, Crook Manifesto!

Rezensierung
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE NOMINEE New York Times Book Review 100 Notable Books of the Year One of The Washington Posts 50 Notable Works of Fiction of the Year TIME Magazine 100 Must Read Books of the Year One of the Best Books of the Year: NPR, Slate, Boston Globe, Town & Country, Vulture, and more One of President Obama's Favorite Books of the Year One of The New York Times Critics' Best Books of the Year

A rich, wild book that could pass for genre fiction. It s much more, but the entertainment value alone should ensure it the same kind of popular success that greeted his last two novels, The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys.'
Janet Maslin, The New York Times

One of the Ten Best Books of 2021
Laura Miller, Slate

Colson Whitehead has a couple of Pulitzers under his belt, along with several other awards celebrating his outstanding novels. Harlem Shuffle is a suspenseful crime thriller that's sure to add to the tally it's a fabulous novel you must read.
NPR.org

A warm, involving novel  
The Wall Street Journal

A a fiendishly clever romp, a heist novel that s also a morality play about respectability politics, a family comedy disguised as a noir Harlem Shuffle reads like a book whose author had enormous fun writing it. The dialogue crackles and sparks; the zippy heist plot twists itself in one showy misdirection after another. Most impressive of all is lovable family-man Ray, whose relentless ambition drives the plot forward while his glib salesman s patter keeps you guessing about his true intentions. This book is a blast that will make you think, and what could be better than that?
Vox

Another triumph from Pulitzer winner Whitehead  
People Magazine

Fast-paced, keen-eyed and very funny, Harlem Shuffle is a novel about race, power and the history of Harlem all disguised as a thrill-ride crime novel.  
San Francisco Chronicle

Enthralling, cinematic Whitehead's evocation of early 1960s Harlem strewn with double-crosses and double standards, broken glass and broken dreams is irresistible a valentine to a time and place.
Minneapolis Star-Tribune

Dazzling exciting and wise.
Walton Muyumba, The Boston Globe

A spectacularly pleasurable read, and while it is, of course, literary, it s also a pure, unapologetic crime-fiction page-turner.  
Los Angeles Times

Harlem Shuffle is a wildly entertaining romp. But as you might expect with this two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and MacArthur genius, Whitehead also delivers a devastating, historically grounded indictment of the separate and unequal lives of Blacks and whites in mid-20th century New York.'
Associated Press

An American master
New York Times Book Review

Two-time Pulitzer winner Whitehead (The Nickel Boys) returns with a sizzling heist novel set in civil rights era Harlem. It s 1959 and Ray Carney has built an unlikely kingdom selling used furniture. A husband, a father, and the son of a man who once worked as muscle for a local crime boss, Carney is only slightly bent when it [comes] to being crooked. But when his cousin Freddie whose stolen goods Carney occasionally fences through his furniture store decides to rob the historic Hotel Theresa, a lethal cast of underworld figures enter Carney s life, among them the mobster Chink Montague, known for his facility with a straight razor ; WWII veteran Pepper; and the murderous, purple-suited Miami Joe, Whitehead s answer to No Country for Old Men s Anton Chigurh. These and other characters force Carney to decide just how bent he wants to be. It s a superlative story, but the most impressive achievement is Whitehead s loving depiction of a Harlem 60 years gone that rustling, keening thing of people and concrete which lands as detailed and vivid as Joyce s Dublin. Don t be surprised if this one wins Whitehead another major award.
Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

Whitehead adds another genre to an ever-diversifying portfolio with his first crime novel, and it's a corker. Ray Carney owns a furniture store in Harlem. When the novel begins in 1959, he's selling mostly used furniture, struggling to escape the legacy of his criminal father. Living taught you, Ray believes, that you didn't have to live the way you'd been taught. Almost. Ray's ne'erdo-well cousin, Freddie, who's been luring Ray into hot water since childhood ( I didn't mean to get you in trouble, is Freddie's constant refrain) regularly brings Ray the odd piece of jewelry, provenance unknown, which Ray peddles to a dealer downtown, building a stake to invest in his business. There was a natural flow of goods in and out and through people's lives . . . a churn of property, and Ray facilitated that churn. It works until Freddie suggests Ray as a fence for a jewel heist at the Hotel Theresa ( the Waldorf of Harlem ), and suddenly the churn produces a potentially disastrous backwash. Following Ray as his business grows and he delicately balances the crooked and straight sides of his life, Whitehead delivers a portrait of Harlem in the early 60s, culminating with the Harlem Riot of 1964, that is brushed with lovingly etched detail and features a wonderful panoply of characters who spring to full-bodied life, blending joy, humor, and tragedy. A triumph on every level.
Booklist, Starred Review






Buchausschnitt
CHAPTER ONE

His cousin Freddie brought him on the heist one hot night in early June. Ray Carney was having one of his run-around days uptown, downtown, zipping across the city. Keeping the machine humming. First up was Radio Row, to unload the final three consoles, two RCAs and a Magnavox, and pick up the TV he left. He d given up on the radios, hadn t sold one in a year and a half no matter how much he marked them down and begged. Now they took up space in the basement that he needed for the new recliners coming in from Argent next week and whatever he picked up from the dead lady s apartment that afternoon. The radios were top-of-the-line three years ago; now padded blankets hid their slick mahogany cabinets, fastened by leather straps to the truck bed. The pickup bounced in the unholy rut of the West Side Highway.

Just that morning there was another article in the Tribune about the city tearing down the elevated highway. Narrow and indifferently cobblestoned, the road was a botch from the start. On the best days it was bumper-to-bumper, a bitter argument of honks and curses, and on rainy days the potholes were treacherous lagoons, one grim slosh. Last week a customer wandered into the store with his head wrapped like a mummy beaned by a chunk of falling balustrade while walking under the damn thing. Said he was going to sue. Carney said, You re in your rights. Around Twenty-Third Street the pickup s wheels bit into a crater and he thought one of the RCAs was going to launch from the bed into the Hudson River. He was relieved when he was able to sneak off at Duane Street without incident.

Carney s man on Radio Row was halfway down Cortlandt, off Greenwich, right in the thick. He got a space outside Samuel s Amazing Radio repair all makes and went to check that Aronowitz was in. Twice in the last year he d come all the way down to find the shop shut in the middle of the day.

A few years ago, walking past the crammed storefronts was like twirling a radio dial this store blared jazz into the street out of horn loudspeakers, the next store German symphonies, then ragtime, and so on. S & S Electronics, Landy s Top Notch, Steinway the Radio King. Now he was more likely to hear rock and roll, in a desperate lure of the teenage scene, and to find the windows crammed with television sets, the latest wonders from DuMont and Motorola and the rest. Consoles in blond hardwood, the sleek new portable lines, and three-in-one hi-fi combos with picture tube, tuner, and turntable in the same cabinet, smart. What hadn t changed was Carney s meandering sidewalk route around the massive bins and buckets of vacuum tubes, audio transformers, and condensers that drew in tinkerers from all over the tri-state. Any part you need, all makes, all models, reasonable prices.

There was a hole in the air where the Ninth Avenue el used to run. That disappeared thing. His father had taken him here once or twice on one of his mysterious errands, when he was little. Carney still thought he heard the train sometimes, rumbling behind the music and haggling of the street.

Aronowitz hunched over the glass counter, with a loupe screwed into his eye socket, poking one of his gizmos. Mr. Carney. He coughed.

There weren t many white men who called him mister. Downtown, anyway. The first time Carney came to the Row on business, the white clerks pretended not to see him, attending to hobbyists who came in after him. He cleared his throat, he gestured, and remained a black ghost, store after store, accumulating the standard humiliations, until he climbed the black iron steps to Aronowitz & Sons and the proprietor asked, Can I help you, sir? Can I help you as in Can I help you? As opposed to What are you doing here? Ray Carney, in his years, had a handle on the variations.