The Harlem Shuffle, by Colson Whitehead

 

Characters
Carney family	Criminals	Others
Ray Carney Elizabeth – wife May and John – children   Freddie – Ray’s cousin, kept getting Ray into trouble   Aunt Millie – Freddie’s mother, raised Ray after father left   Mike Carney – Ray’s father   Alma and Leland Jones – Elizabeth’s parents	Miami Joe Arthur – safe-cracker Pepper Freddie   Chink Montague – collected money for protection   Detective Munson – collected payoffs   Harvey Moskovitz, jeweler, fence   Thomas Andrew Bruce “Cheap Brucie”   Biz Dixon – drug dealer, Carney had to take care of him before Duke   Linus Van Wyck – died of overdose	Rusty – furniture store clerk   Dumas Club: Leland Jones Terrance Pierce – lawyer Franklin D. Shepard – lawyer Wilfred Duke – took $500 bribe for Ray’s membership and then he was declined   Marie – secretary at store   “Duke job” Pepper Miss Laura - prostitute Tommy Lips – surveillance Zippo - photographer

 

For Discussion:

NOTE: Page numbers are from hardback edition.

1.       Wherever Carney went, he described and evaluated the furniture.  For example, when he went to Miss Laura’s apartment he saw “A Burlington Hall four-poster bed with tasseled mauve curtains dominated the living room, centered on a Heriz rug of lush crimson” (page 161).  Did the furniture descriptions add to your enjoyment of the book?  Did they give you any insight into Carney’s character?

2.       In Carney’s accounting class the professor, Professor Simonov, told the class that “until the advent of the light bulb, it was common to sleep in two shifts” with the break in between called the “dorvay” (page 135).  He said “it was a respite from the normal world and its demands, a hollow of private enterprise carved out of lost hours” (page 135).  What did you think about this idea?

3.       In the beginning, did Carney think he was doing anything wrong?  Early on he described the activity as a “natural flow of goods in and out and through people’s lives, from here to there, a churn of property, and Ray Carney facilitated that churn.  As a middleman.  Legit” (page 25).  Where did he actually cross the line to crime?  Could he have turned back at any point?

4.       Elizabeth’s parents thought that she had “settled” when she married Carney.  Do you think this knowledge influenced Ray and his decisions?

5.       On page 202 we read that after the pictures were published in the newspaper, Duke left town with all the money people had invested in the new bank.  Was the plan for revenge against Duke worth all the problems it caused the rest of the community? 

6.       Did the act of revenge lower Carney to Duke’s level?  Was that worth it?

7.       At the end of the novel, Carney thought about how the neighborhood was devastated by the building of the World Trade Center compared to the lesser devastation of the riots.   What did you think about this comparison?

8.       Also at the end, Carney and his family were moving to Strivers’ Row, a more affluent neighborhood.  Why did he keep fencing stolen property if things were going well financially?

9.       How would you categorize this book: crime novel, addressing racial issues, literary fiction, or something else?

10.   Whitehead won the Pulitzer Prize two years in a row for his two previous books, The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys.  If you read those books, how did this one compare?   Why was it not on the best seller lists as long as the previous two?