So is the furniture store, where Ray spins fables to gullible young couples, telling one that they’re looking at a sofa that was featured on “The Donna Reed Show” and otherwise slinging whatever’s necessary to keep business afloat.

Whitehead’s elaborate way of handling this plot thread is reason enough to read him. He’s got the upward mobility offered by a prestigious club, though being accepted may depend on whether he’s darker than a paper bag - that notorious criterion - and will definitely cost him a payoff. He’s got a white cop who needs bribing if Ray wants to stay in business. He’s got lighter-skinned in-laws who raised their daughter on Strivers’ Row and see him as unworthy.

He’s a liminal criminal.īut only a few of them are lucky enough to know that. Ray runs Carney’s Furniture, but he’s OK with occasionally fencing jewelry on the side. Then there’s Ray, who inevitably gets caught up in all of this. Meet the rogues’ gallery Whitehead has dreamed up for this: There is Miami Joe, the purple-suited dope who plans the heist Chink Montague, the gangster who was staying there with a starlet and is peeved that her necklace has vanished from the safe Chet the Vet and Yea Big, Montague’s enforcers and Cousin Freddie, who never met a crime he didn’t like. The robbery gives Whitehead a lot to play with from a plot perspective, and allows him to evoke a ravishing lost landmark in the process. The Theresa was so glamorous, such a magnet for Black royalty, that violating it “was like slipping Jackie Robinson a Mickey the night before the World Series,” Whitehead writes. The narrative takes place in the middle of the 20th century, and a key story line involves a heist at the Hotel Theresa (Harlem’s answer to the Hotel Pierre in Midtown, which was in fact robbed in 1972). 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.” It reads like a book whose author thoroughly enjoyed what he was doing. All of these are somehow worked into a rich, wild book that could pass for genre fiction. “Harlem Shuffle” brings Whitehead’s unwavering eloquence - at one point he describes traffic as “honking molasses” - to a mix of city history, niche hangouts, racial stratification, high hopes and low individuals. He has said he may keep Ray going into another book, and it won’t take you long to figure out why. “Sometimes he slipped and his mind went thataway,” Colson Whitehead writes about Ray Carney, the crime-adjacent Harlem furniture salesman at the center of his new novel, “Harlem Shuffle.” Whitehead’s own mind has famously gone thataway through nine other books that don’t much resemble one another, but this time he’s hit upon a setup that will stick.

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