The harlem shuffle colson whitehead5/29/2023 ![]() ![]() Elizabeth works for a travel agency that specializes in planning Green Book-style itineraries that help Black travelers navigate the treacherous highways and byways of the segregated 1950s and 60s. Carney is also a tender husband to his supportive pregnant wife Elizabeth and father to their young daughter Mary. Many of Carney’s clients struggle financially and fear shopping in white-owned stores where they might be denied service or otherwise humiliated. ![]() In his “straight” life, Carney is the owner and proprietor of Carney’s Furniture, which serves the neighborhood’s Black clientele by offering new and “gently used” furniture and appliances along with a forgiving policy on lines of credit. Set from 1959 to 1964, the novel comprises three episodes charting the precarious rise of Carney, a self-made man who habitually dips and sometimes dives into New York’s criminal underworld. Harlem Shuffle is a bravura performance, an immersive, laugh-out-loud, riveting adventure whose narrative energy is boosted by its memorable hero and a highly relevant backdrop of social injustice. Colson Whitehead’s new novel, Harlem Shuffle, is the epic and captivating story of Ray Carney-furniture salesman, family man, entrepreneur on the rise and a vivid, walking, breathing, living exemplar of that classic archetype, the striver. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |