Colson Whitehead just wants to have fun

On the Shelf Harlem Shuffle By Colson Whitehead Doubleday: 336 pages, $29 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. “Cool It Baby,” one of three connected stories that make up Colson Whitehead’s new novel, “Harlem Shuffle,” opens in the aftermath of this eruption, when furniture dealer/fence Ray Carney receives a visit from his ne’er-do-well cousin Freddie. Whitehead started thinking about “Harlem Shuffle” in 2014, before writing his next two novels, 2016’s “The Underground Railroad” and 2019’s “The Nickel Boys” — serious books full of trauma and devastation that won unprecedented back-to-back Pulitzer Prizes. Whitehead sees “Harlem Shuffle” as “three novellas that come together Voltron-style to make a novel”: Each can stand alone, “but together, they gain power.” Clocking in at just over 100 pages each, these interlocked narratives track Carney’s schemes, victories and misdeeds, as well as the changes in his life, in 1959, 1961 and 1964. “A fence is in between the straight world and the crooked world,” says the author, and that position — its duality and precarious nature — shapes Carney’s circumstances, movements and personality.