Book Review
Crook Manifesto
by Colson Whitehead
If you need to offload some suspiciously acquired jewellery while getting a good deal on a recliner in 1970s Harlem, Ray Carney’s your man. Or, at least, he used to be, before he went straight – now he’s living comfortably with his loving family, thriving furniture business and a home on Striver’s Row. But the line between straight and crooked is a thin one, and whether it’s Jackson 5 tickets, an ill-fated blaxploitation film or a random act of arson, circumstances inevitably conspire to drag Carney back towards the criminal underworld of Harlem. It’s a place of backroom deals and midnight capers, a whirlpool of danger that constantly threatens to pull Carney under for good.
With Crook Manifesto, Colson Whitehead returns to the vividly realised New York he introduced in Harlem Shuffle. It’s an endlessly compelling city populated by capital ‘C’ Characters and animated by a perpetual churn of complex social relations and ever-changing streets, old edifices continually making way for new constructions. It’s a world that owes its existence to Whitehead’s unbelievably crisp prose, which seamlessly combines exposition, character development and worldbuilding into a gripping narrative voice that can just as easily produce a home truth about race in America as it can a grim chuckle.
Like Harlem Shuffle, the novel is lightly episodic, each section stepping forwards through the years to introduce some new crisis in Harlem, some new collision of the straight and crooked. It’s a structure which allows Crook Manifesto to comfortably exist both as a sequel and a standalone work – you won’t be lost if you haven’t read Harlem Shuffle, but together the two books form a portrait of Harlem and its people that is twice as rich and deep. However, unlike Harlem Shuffle’s clear focus on Carney’s family ties and ambition, the connective tissue between each episode in Crook Manifesto is looser and more ambitious, pulling back from Carney to better interrogate the city itself. Its themes and ideas demand multiple readings to fully unravel, but if you’re just looking for crime-novel thrills, Whitehead still delivers that in spades.
