Colson Whitehead once admitted in an interview that he loves heist movies (heist movies in English) and this is what inspired him to write Harlem Shuffle : the story of Ray Carney, son of a small bandit without scale who dreams of a respectable life, but whose past and family mores end up catching up with him.
Married, father of a family, Ray dreams of earning the respect of his in-laws who consider him a redneck. He would like to be able to offer his family a bigger apartment on one of the beautiful streets of Harlem.
On the surface, he’s the respectable owner of a furniture store, but in the back room, increasingly shady things are happening through cousin Freddie. The latter will convince Ray to embark on a big coup: the theft of the safety deposit boxes from the Hotel Theresa, which was called at the time the “Waldorf Astoria” of Harlem, and where several mythical characters such as Louis Armstrong landed. , Muhammad Ali or Duke Ellington. For Ray, who dreams of extricating himself from his mediocrity, the offer is too tempting. His family legacy is stronger than anything.
We find in this thriller the themes dear to Whitehead, even if they are coated with humor.
The action takes place in the early 1960s in a mythical Harlem, and culminates in July 1964, the day after the assassination of James Powell, a young 15-year-old African-American shot dead by a white policeman who was not in service. The event will trigger a series of riots in the streets of Harlem which will spread like wildfire in the United States.
But Ray, Freddie and the gallery of earthy characters imagined by Whitehead completely miss this rendezvous with the history of American civil rights. Worse still, they planned to commit their burglary on June 19 (Juneteenth), the day of commemoration of the emancipation of African-American slaves.
As we can see, Colson Whitehead’s humor is tinged with a certain cynicism, which does not prevent him from addressing serious issues: family ties, civil rights, class struggle, racism…
Those who had discovered it with Underground Railroad Where Nickel Boystwo powerful novels that won him two Pulitzer Prizes (!), may be unsettled by this caustic humor, but those who have read his first books will find the irony that allows Whitehead to deal with the great heartbreaks of history. American without feeling obliged to press in broad strokes.
Harlem Shuffle
Colson Whitehead, translated from English (US) by Charles Recoursé
Albin Michael
400 pages