The robbery, which occupies the first part of the book, is perfectly executed both by its participants and by its omniscient author. Whitehead’s prose becomes tense, exciting, and jolly as he describes the (fictional) printing of the (real) Hotel Theresa—the lucky “center of the Negro world”. “Robbing The Hotel Theresa” was like “kissing Mickey to Jackie Robinson the night before the World Series,” Whitehead said. The novel treats the hotel itself as a microcosm of Harlem, with each civilian caught in the robbery tagged with a flexible biography. Had Whitehead finished the book after this violent and funny episode, it would have been one of the few excellent novels in American literature.
Sadly—or fortunately, depending on your taste—Whitehead continues; and the rest of the book gives mixed results.
“Harlem Shuffle” is structured as a three-part mini-series set in 1959, 1961 and 1964. As it continues, riots that open fire against the police shake Harlem; the old cunning gangsters are being replaced by a new kind of “fiery, wild, always insignificant” hoods; and “The Junkie Shake, that new dance” becomes “all the rage.” The taste of each episode changes little, but they are linked by Carney and his cousin Freddie, who always lures Carney into intrigues by chance against his will.
If the first episode is a portrait of a reluctant crook, then in the second episode Carney is more of a relaxed family man, rising in the world, expanding his showroom, than being a fence. He also squirms angrily after being scammed for $500 by a sleazy Harlem banker who failed to deliver on his promise of membership in an elite club of Harlem movers and shakers. For the next 100 pages, often with a shaky plot—”I need to take care of one thing before I can do something else, and I have to do something else before I can,” explains Carney, a little too aptly—Carney plots an elaborate revenge against the banker. .
Like the heist though, this revenge runs perfectly with few consequences for Carney – and the book loses energy as a result. Instead of putting Carney’s self-image into crisis, Whitehead gives us less-than-original observations of how everyone is a fraud. In fact, after the riveting peril of the first episode, Whitehead shields Carney from real harm for most of the novel, and for many scenes—the sitcom is filled with a graded angel wife, evil mother-in-laws, and wonderfully misogynistic or sexually depraved criminals. violence — get the dreamy feel of a comic book. The darkness of Carney’s solitary childhood, drug use, violent crime is pushed into corners and only occasionally revealed, as in a character’s deeply depressing and sinister flashback to building a supply line in Burma during WWII. And while I treasured Whitehead’s attempt to write a calm character on the brink of success—which is extremely difficult to pull off in fiction—I missed the tense prose of “The Nickel Boys,” where every sentence spit succinctly, advancing the brutal story. .