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Harlem Shuffle
The word “panorama” first referred to a device from 1796, a “painting on a revolving cylindrical surface,” to quote Merriam Webster. It was a trick to let you see a scene too wide for your eyes to focus on.
Harlem Shuffle is a panorama. It moves through New York in its short span of years, 1959 through 1964, giving the sense that there is always another anecdote it didn’t report, something else happening down another block behind the ones it turns down.
The choice of a main character, Ray Carney, almost feels like it could have been anyone: anyone black, that is, from generational poverty in Harlem, quietly intent on making the most of opportunities presented to them, and uncovering the ones that aren’t.
Like the customers that buy sofas in his furniture store, Carney pays for his life on an installment plan. His ethical compromises recognize that the law of the post-war American society he lives in was not made with Carney’s benefit in mind. But its values of prosperity and security still hold meaning for him. Though I’m not sure he trusts its definition of “goodness.”
What is underneath Carney’s compromises? Is there a real person down there, being pragmatic about the ends justifying the means? Or is this just a trick, a story for a story’s sake and one we’ve heard before, about a man willing to do anything for a better life in a city that never sleeps?
Read through the discussion questions below with your book club and work your way back to that big one above, if you’d like.
Book club questions for Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead
Use these discussion questions to guide your next book club meeting.
1. As a furniture salesman, Carney seems always to be selling couches, as opposed to beds, tables, or other kinds of furniture. Why do you think Whitehead made that choice?
You can consider Carney’s slogans he comes up with during the 1964 riots:
“After a long day of fighting the Man, why not put your feet up--on a new Collins-Hathaway ottoman”
“Presenting the new Collins-Hathaway three-point recliner--finally a sit in we can all agree upon”
“A comfortable sofa outlasts the day’s news--it’s built for a lifetime.”
2. What does this novel want you to feel about the illegal acts Carney, Freddie, and Pepper commit? Are there good guys and bad guys in Harlem Shuffle?
3. Ok let’s ask question 2 a different way: Do phrases like “fleet, balletic slasher” or “audacious sadism” seem positive or negative?
4. Does the violence in Harlem Shuffle feel real? Like it has stakes?
5. The novel opens with two paragraphs where Carney is stranded in a traffic jam--paralyzed by the New York City infrastructure. What is Carney’s relationship to the city around him? Or, let’s put it a different way: what is New York City to Ray Carney?
6. Does this book make you want to climb into it and visit its version of New York? It did for me, almost instantly. Is that a weird thing for me to say? What attracts you if it does?
7. What does Harlem Shuffle have to say about the present?
8. Here’s why I asked question 7. Whitehead designs a lot of other worlds that clearly speak to ours in his novels: in The Underground Railroad, an alternate history where slavery never ends, especially. Here, it’s almost like he’s doing the opposite: turning a historical period into something slightly fantastic.
What separates Harlem Shuffle from more clearly fictional gangster stories set in New York, like Martin Scorsese’s? If your answer is something like “racism,” how is this novel about racism?
9. Not all novels have to be deep, although they do all have to be good. There’s a literary genre called the “picaresque,” where the hero, the picaro, is intentionally kept shallow: we’re only interested in his adventures, his travels. Harlem Shuffle is about traveling too: Elizabeth works for a travel agency that helps black vacationers stay safe, and the novel itself seems like a map of “the black nation inside the white world, part of the bigger thing but its own self, independent, with its own constitution.”
Does depth have to be about human psychology and personality, or can a map be deep?
10. Is it subversive, or even important, in 2021, to suggest that good and evil aren’t strict opposites?
Harlem Shuffle Book Club Questions PDF
Click here for a printable PDF of the Harlem Shuffle discussion questions