NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • From the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, a gloriously entertaining novel of heists, shakedowns, and rip-offs set in Harlem in the 1960s. "Ray Carney was only ...

Harlem Shuffle is certainly a well-written book. The characters are fun, the setting is evocative, the plot is compelling, and the sentences pop in places. You are not going to go wrongly reading this book. The real question is how this book stacks up to Whitehead's other transcendent work. Everyone got and appreciated the core theme, the thin line between striving and crime and how all the characters need to find a way to walk it and advance as time marches on, destroying the past. Roy Carney was a fascinating character and we spent a lot of time debating his strengths and flaws. Kim pointed to the line about how Carney takes the stains out of his own clothes as an apt metaphor for this role in story; he's the character who walks between striving and crime, fitting enough in the crime world to get ahead, but keep his head down low enough to not create trouble in his family (we can't help but think his wife knows what he's doing vaguely, but he wisely does not want to bring it too much to her social-justice-oriented perspective), and signs are that most of the time he weaves these worlds masterfully. The choice to make him a furniture salesman both gives us a great set of asides throughout the book and becomes a tight metaphor about how everyone at the end of the day has some domestic in them, no matter how hard they are, and the concept of dorvay in the second section paints his two-sided world beautifully. The book looks at three moments where he's out of his depth and stakes get high, and all of this is very fun -- kind of a light Pynchon version of Ocean's 11 set on 125th Street. The secondary characters, and particularly Pepper and Miss Laura, shine, and the twists of the plot are the right amount of risk and speed to keep the book moving. At the same time, Whitehead does a good job of weaving in questions about race and society and perceived status. One thing we talked a lot about was the different masks people wore in different setttings. All the characters, from Carney to his brother Freddy to Freddy's friend Van Wyck show how they change as they navigate their worlds, and we were impressed at how Whitehead never creates monolithic perspectives in the book. Takes on the protesting, policing, Juneteenth, and Harlem all show that Carney is not a Black everyman, and that in fact there's no such thing. A beautiful passage where Carney goes for a ride with a police officer shows that there are hustles on his block of which even he's unaware, and his brush with the Van Wycks in the final section point to a whole power structure of Whiteness beyond his world. Maybe a good way of putting it is that the book is very local in a very complex world, and so Carney's journey is figuring out in which world he sits and how to best sit there. Overall, it's a very good book, but smaller and breezier than, say, Underground Railroad, and that meant that some of NUBClub found it a bit forgettable. We ended up thinking of it as the beach read of the Whitehead canon, definitely a book you'll enjoy, but not the one that will blow your mind.