Time Jumps, Linked Stories, and the Art of Character Evolution
🎧Listen to Audio Teaching Here
🧐 Before getting started, ponder a couple questions:
- Considering Ray Carney’s progression, is this ultimately a tragedy plot? Examine the evidence for both this and other possible plot structures in the text.
- How does Whitehead’s technique of marking time through personal, political, and social details contribute to both character development and themes of transformation? Look for similar opportunities in your own work.
Let’s go….
Part I: The Genesis and Structure of Harlem Shuffle
Colson Whitehead’s career trajectory includes winning two Pulitzer Prizes – one for The Underground Railroad (2017) and another for The Nickel Boys (2020). His first novel was “The Intuitionist” (1999). Harlem Shuffle published in 2021 (the first book in the Harlem Trilogy) that follows furniture salesman Ray Carney in 1960’s Harlem as he becomes increasingly involved in various criminal schemes while straddling the worlds of legitimate business and crime.
In 2014, as Whitehead explains: “I was looking out a car window and thinking, ‘I love heist movies. Can I write a heist novel? And if I did, how would that work?'”
The answer is this book and the two others to come (#2 Crookshank Manifesto, out now, and three is pending) and he explores some key themes:
- The dual nature of Harlem’s economy and society during this period
- Questions of moral compromise and social mobility
- The role of race and class in 1960’s New York
- The changing urban landscape of Harlem
- Family legacy and generational patterns
Part II: The Architecture of Time
Whitehead describes his protagonist’s journey: “He’s running a con on himself. He deceives himself about how much he likes the crooked lifestyle… Eventually, his eyes are opened to how things actually work in Harlem and in the city. Everyone’s crooked.”
This evolution is marked through carefully placed details:
- In Part 1, 1959-1960, Elizabeth is pregnant with their second child. In Part 2, 1961, that child is born and two years old. And the first child, who was a particular age in book one has aged up.
- In Part 1, Elizabeth isn’t working due to the complications of her second pregnancy, in Part 2,, she’s back to work and with a progressive travel agency helping blacks avoid racist destinations.
- There’s also the political shift. In Part 2, Kennedy is the president and there is a new hope, new energy to the country that in Part 3 goes sideways after the assassination of Kennedy and collective anger over injustice by police that leads to massive rioting.
- In Part 1, Ray is just starting his business and hoping to get out of the squalid apartment he lives in with Elizabeth. In Part 2, the business is expanding and the apt fund is growing but they are still in that apt., dreaming. In Part 3, he’s in the higher end apt on Riverside drive.
Part III: The Architecture of Moral Descent
From Whitehead’s own reflection: “He would very much not like to live in the house he grew up in. He doesn’t want to be a criminal. He doesn’t want to live like his father, who was a petty thief. He wants a wife and kids and all those middle-class trappings that were denied him. But he is who he is.”
Plot-wise, the primary arc of Carney is that he believes himself to be a legitimate businessman who cuts a few corners and exploits specific situations that come his way (fenced goods or things that come from otherwise dark corners) who then becomes darker and darker over the course of the story to the point that he’s no longer bent but as crooked as the rest and doing what he can to not get killed, or get anyone else killed.
The progression unfolds across three parts:
Part 1: Self-delusion or quantifying his level of dishonesty. “I’m bad but my father was worse,” which meets the conflicts he feels about his reckless cousin. He’s loyal to that cousin but also irritated at him because he now has a young and growing family of his own to protect, though one could argue his semi-illegal activities and his self-delusions about it have already put that family at risk.
Part 2: Revenge for the snub within his family that destroys his in-laws and several other people in the process who were all involved with the shady banker, Duke. The banker gets away. (Possible link to future book and continuation).
Part 3: Back to loyalty to his cousin and an unwilling but necessary action to help that results in several murders and the death of his cousin. At the end is it what would certainly be considered a Tragedy Plot, but unfinished in a way because Ray hasn’t destroyed everything he loves yet but rather is off to look at yet another place to live “Striver’s Row.”
Part IV: Mastering the Linked-Story Structure
The novel’s architecture demonstrates what Whitehead describes as following, “who you want to be versus who you actually are.” This plays out in:
Part 1: The Truck, the Hotel Theresa heist serves as an inciting incident that pulls Carney deeper into the criminal world. This sets up the central tension between his legitimate business persona and his growing involvement in crime.
Part 2: Dorvey, the midpoint could be seen in when Carney begins actively choosing criminal enterprises (vengeance on Duke) rather than being pulled in reluctantly – marking his transformation from reluctant participant to active player.
Part 3, Cool it Baby, builds to a climax involving both criminal elements from the lowest element and those at the highest reaches of NY society showing where Carney’s attempts at social mobility might take him.
This book has what is called a linked-story-structure which creates a unique narrative architecture. Each of the books has its own complete dramatic arc – a heist, a revenge plot, a social climbing scheme – and they also, at the same time, build upon each other thematically. Earlier consequences echo into later sections, and relationships established in the first part evolve or deteriorate across the timeline.
Master Class Lessons for Writers:
- Use time gaps to imply character development rather than explicitly showing every change
- Create satisfying individual story arcs that also serve a larger narrative
- Choose specific moments that can carry the weight of broader themes and historical context
Critical Reception and Impact of Harlem Shuffle
Many reviewers highlight how Harlem Shuffle succeeds both as an entertaining crime story and as a serious examination of race, class, and morality in 1960s Harlem. The book was noted for being somewhat lighter in tone than Whitehead’s previous two novels while still maintaining his sharp social commentary.
As Whitehead reflects: “To this day, I still seem to be riding off that year’s (2014’s) creative energies.” Through this careful examination of Harlem Shuffle’s structure, we can see exactly how he channeled those energies into a masterwork of technical precision and thematic resonance that all started with an interesting observation “Can I write a heist novel?” The answer it seems is yes! See you in class.
