Colson Whitehead’s vivid, noirish Harlem Shuffle – whose sequel, Crook Manifesto, arrives in print this month – features Ray Carney, a wise-cracking, hard-working furniture salesman with connections to New York’s criminal underworld.
Carney, whose story is told over three acts, is the son of a long-deceased local hoodlum and is “only slightly bent when it comes to being crooked”. As the proprietor of Carney’s Furniture, he serves the black clientele in his neighbourhood, selling “gently used” items with a generous credit policy. Carney is determined to stay on the straight and narrow and become part of the city’s business elite, but then his cousin, Freddie, ropes him into a hotel heist. Predictably, things don’t go according to plan and Carney finds himself neck-deep in gun-toting mobsters and bent cops, several of whom are old adversaries of his father.
Real-life events weave around Whitehead’s characters: as the Harlem riots rage in 1964, Carney gets off the subway and is exasperated to find the streets full of people waving signs. “[They are] chanting, ‘We want Malcolm X! and ‘Killer cops must go!’ I’m hungry. I don’t want to deal with all that. I’m trying to get a sandwich.”
The voice actor Dion Graham is the narrator: his reading is fast-paced and draws out Carney’s easy charm, optimism and desire for advancement. Despite being a striver who loves his wife and his community, Carney is denied entry to the institutions that would give him the respectability he craves. In trying to rise above the circumstances of his birth, “[his] mistake was to believe he’d become someone else”.
• Harlem Shuffle is available via Hachette Audio, 10 hr 35 min
Further listening
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
Taylor Jenkins Reid, Simon & Schuster, 12 hr 10 min
Alma Cuervo, Julia Whelan and Robin Miles narrate this tale of a journalist assigned to write the life story of a reclusive Hollywood star.
Straight Outta Crawley: Memoirs of a Distinctly Average Human Being
Romesh Ranganathan, Random House Audiobooks, 5 hr 41 min
The hardest-working man in comedy recounts his suburban beginnings, his first standup set at a Pontins holiday camp talent show, and subsequent rise to fame.
