As Ray navigates this double life, he begins to see who actually pulls the strings in Harlem. Thus begins the internal tussle between Ray the striver and Ray the crook. Now Ray has a new clientele, one made up of shady cops, vicious local gangsters, two-bit pornographers, and other assorted Harlem lowlifes.
The heist doesn’t go as planned they rarely do. Then Freddie falls in with a crew who plan to rob the Hotel Theresa-the “Waldorf of Harlem”-and volunteers Ray’s services as the fence. He knows a discreet jeweler downtown who doesn’t ask questions, either. Cracks that are getting bigger all the time.Ĭash is tight, especially with all those installment-plan sofas, so if his cousin Freddie occasionally drops off the odd ring or necklace, Ray doesn’t ask where it comes from. He and his wife Elizabeth are expecting their second child, and if her parents on Striver’s Row don’t approve of him or their cramped apartment across from the subway tracks, it’s still home.įew people know he descends from a line of uptown hoods and crooks, and that his façade of normalcy has more than a few cracks in it. “Ray Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked…” To his customers and neighbors on 125th street, Carney is an upstanding salesman of reasonably priced furniture, making a decent life for himself and his family.
(Sept.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. Don’t be surprised if this one wins Whitehead another major award. It’s a superlative story, but the most impressive achievement is Whitehead’s loving depiction of a Harlem 60 years gone-“that rustling, keening thing of people and concrete”-which lands as detailed and vivid as Joyce’s Dublin. These and other characters force Carney to decide just how bent he wants to be. A husband, a father, and the son of a man who once worked as muscle for a local crime boss, Carney is “only slightly bent when it to being crooked.” But when his cousin Freddie-whose stolen goods Carney occasionally fences through his furniture store-decides to rob the historic Hotel Theresa, a lethal cast of underworld figures enter Carney’s life, among them the mobster Chink Montague, “known for his facility with a straight razor” WWII veteran Pepper and the murderous, purple-suited Miami Joe, Whitehead’s answer to No Country for Old Men’s Anton Chigurh. It’s 1959 and Ray Carney has built an “unlikely kingdom” selling used furniture. Two-time Pulitzer winner Whitehead ( The Nickel Boys) returns with a sizzling heist novel set in civil rights–era Harlem.
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