Summary
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * The two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author of Harlem Shuffle continues his Harlem saga in a powerful and hugely-entertaining novel that summons 1970s New York in all its seedy glory.
A Best Book of the Year: The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, NPR, BookPage
"Dazzling" -Walter Mosley, The New York Times Book Review.
It's 1971. Trash piles up on the streets, crime is at an all-time high, the city is careening towards bankruptcy, and a shooting war has broken out between the NYPD and the Black Liberation Army. Amidst this collective nervous breakdown furniture store owner and ex-fence Ray Carney tries to keep his head down and his business thriving. His days moving stolen goods around the city are over. It's strictly the straight-and-narrow for him -- until he needs Jackson 5 tickets for his daughter May and he decides to hit up his old police contact Munson, fixer extraordinaire. But Munson has his own favors to ask of Carney and staying out of the game gets a lot more complicated - and deadly.
1973. The counter-culture has created a new generation, the old ways are being overthrown, but there is one constant, Pepper, Carney's endearingly violent partner in crime. It's getting harder to put together a reliable crew for hijackings, heists, and assorted felonies, so Pepper takes on a side gig doing security on a Blaxploitation shoot in Harlem. He finds himself in a freaky world of Hollywood stars, up-and-coming comedians, and celebrity drug dealers, in addition to the usual cast of hustlers, mobsters, and hit men. These adversaries underestimate the seasoned crook - to their regret.
1976. Harlem is burning, block by block, while the whole country is gearing up for Bicentennial celebrations. Carney is trying to come up with a July 4th ad he can live with. ("Two Hundred Years of Getting Away with It!"), while his wife Elizabeth is campaigning for her childhood friend, the former assistant D.A and rising politician Alexander Oakes. When a fire severely injures one of Carney's tenants, he enlists Pepper to look into who may be behind it. Our crooked duo have to battle their way through a crumbling metropolis run by the shady, the violent, and the utterly corrupted.
CROOK MANIFESTO is a darkly funny tale of a city under siege, but also a sneakily searching portrait of the meaning of family. Colson Whitehead's kaleidoscopic portrait of Harlem is sure to stand as one of the all-time great evocations of a place and a time.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Whitehead returns with a colorful if haphazard sequel to Harlem Shuffle involving an interconnected series of misguided capers. In 1971, Harlem furniture dealer Art Carney hits up corrupt cop and fixer Detective Munson for Jackson 5 tickets for his daughter. Munson, in possession of some stolen diamonds, reels Carney back into the fence work he'd recently retired from in exchange for the tickets. The night takes a turn for the worse when Munson forces Carney at gunpoint to help with more dangerous errands, including a stickup of a neighborhood gangster's poker game. The next and strongest section focuses on Pepper, Carney's occasional associate in crime, who is moonlighting as hired muscle on a 1973 Blaxploitation film production. When actor Lucinda Cole goes missing, Pepper visits her drug dealer, a dangerous gangster, and others, spilling a fair amount of blood on Lucinda's behalf. In the final act, Carney hires Pepper to find out who's setting tenement fires at the same time as redevelopment schemes transform the dilapidated neighborhood. Unfortunately, the momentum is throttled by copious references to events in the previous book, while an explosive climax feels rushed. Still, almost every page has at least one great line ("A man has a hierarchy of crime, of what is morally acceptable and what is not"). There's fun to be had, but it's not Whitehead's best. (July)
Guardian Review
In his last novel, 2021's Harlem Shuffle, Colson Whitehead introduced us to Ray Carney, a vibrant creation of fierce contradictions. A family man and respectable businessman, he's constantly drawn back into the nefarious legacy of his own father's villainy. As a furniture salesman and occasional receiver of stolen goods, his dual occupations reflect these polarities. His legitimate enterprise is one of modish interiors and the promise of comfort; his crooked side hustle plays out in the harsh exterior and threat of the street. And he's not just holding it together in his own being - he's somehow making sense of the chaotic environment of 1960s New York. "He was a wall between the criminal world and the straight world," it is stated early on, "necessary, bearing the load." This compelling juxtaposition intensifies as we move into the 1970s with Whitehead's follow-up, Crook Manifesto. Carney has been going straight: "four years of honest and rewarding work in home furnishings", as the period style moves from sedate mid-century modern into the mad extremes of that most garish of decades. The city beyond is spiralling into an apocalyptic decline, nearing bankruptcy with staggering levels of crime, corruption and political violence. But it's a simple act of parental generosity that gets him into real trouble once more. A quest for elusive Jackson 5 tickets for his teenage daughter May leads him to Munson, bent cop and fixer, an old associate from the earlier novel. Whitehead's finely tuned sense of history puts his protagonist just at the wrong time and place in a greater narrative: the NYPD is in a shooting war with the Black Liberation Army (a more radical offshoot of the Black Panthers), while the Knapp Commission is investigating institutional police corruption. Munson is heavily implicated in the latter and, as a white cop in a black precinct, has for years been part of a vicious cycle of hellish logic. As the oppressive policing of an African American community by a white overclass disproportionately criminalises its occupants, it also allows for a greater level of corruption among its supposed law enforcers, so Harlem becomes the favoured borough for dirty cops on the take. "That's why they called it the Gold Coast," Munson muses wistfully as he attempts one final looting rampage, dragging Carney into his brutal endgame. Whitehead deploys a clipped and hard-boiled style that can pick up the pace at any moment, yet there's a meditative, internalised element to his prose that puts us inside the action, allowing for reflection and candour among its participants. When the violence comes it is suitably shocking and abrupt, and grimly implosive rather than gratuitously spectacular. And there is much wry and eloquent humour providing a running social commentary and giving an angle on our protagonist's predicaments. Observing the style of the Jackson 5, it's remarked: "Carney's upbringing was such that he couldn't help but opine that flared trousers were well-suited for quick access to an ankle holster." The novel is divided into three sections, and we jump through the decade. Moving from 1971 to 1973, we find the furniture showroom used as a location for a blaxploitation movie, with much delight in period exuberance. The director, Zippo (a "hippie-ass Negro in snakeskin pants and megawatt yellow blouse"), has pyromaniacal tendencies and likens his obsession with firestarting to cinematography. Genuine heavy Pepper, who we also met in the previous novel, is hired as security for the film set and becomes something of a counterpoint to Ray Carney's character: a professional criminal reluctantly drawn into the straight life. He's bemused as a cartoonish facsimile of his world goes into production and bewildered by the mixed crew of grips, gaffers and continuity. "Frankly the racial?harmony shit put Pepper on edge." His confusion deepens when he's called upon to trace the missing lead Lucinda Cole, erstwhile girlfriend of a Harlem gang boss. Art imitating life turns full circle and it's Pepper's street philosophy that provides the novel's rubric: "A man has a hierarchy of crime, of what is morally acceptable, and what is not, a crook manifesto, and those who subscribe to lesser codes are cockroaches." As the film wraps he's left pondering: "What about his own continuity?" And as the final section takes us to 1976, amid the empty pomp of the bicentennial celebrations, a truly ruthless crook manifesto emerges from the rotten power structures of a city in fiscal crisis. A spate of arson attacks point to insurance jobs and something more sinister: covert political policy. "If East Harlem and Brownsville burn up," a lawyer explains starkly, "think how much money we can save on slum clearance before we redevelop it." When the 11-year?old son of a neighbour is hospitalised after a firebombing, Carney feels compelled to act, and the heat is on in his life again. Two-time Pulitzer-winning author Whitehead shows no sign of resting on his laurels. Crook Manifesto continues the brilliantly realised sequence that began with Harlem Shuffle, intricately depicting cultural history and family drama with the compelling energy of a crime thriller and the sharp wit of social satire. Harlem itself is one of the lead characters, and there are echoes of other chroniclers of this burg such as James Baldwin and Chester Himes. In ambition and scope, in the way the intimate is so deftly weaved with the epic, one is also reminded of Balzac. Whitehead has embarked on a great comédie humaine of his own.
Kirkus Review
Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Whitehead continues his boisterous, incisive saga of late-20th-century Harlem and of a furniture dealer barely keeping his criminal side at bay. The adventures of entrepreneur, family man, and sometime fence Ray Carney, which began with Harlem Shuffle (2021), are carried from the Black Citadel's harried-but-hopeful 1960s of that book to the dismal-and-divided '70s shown here. In the first of three parts, it's 1971, and Carney's business is growing even amid the city's Nixon-era doldrums and the rise of warring militant groups like the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army. Carney barely thinks about sliding back into his more illicit vocation until his teenage daughter, May, starts hankering to see the Jackson 5 perform at Madison Square Garden. And so he decides to look up an old contact named Munson, a seriously bent White NYPD officer and "accomplished fixer," who agrees to get free "up close" seats for the concert if Carney will fence stolen jewelry stuffed in a paper bag. But the job carries far more physical peril than advertised, culminating in a long night's journey into day with Carney getting beaten, robbed, and strong-armed into becoming Munson's reluctant, mostly passive partner in the cop's wanton rampage throughout the city. In the second part, it's 1973, and Pepper, Carney's strong, silent confidant and all-purpose tough guy, is recruited to work security on the set of a blaxploitation epic whose female lead inexplicably goes missing. The third and final part takes place in the bicentennial year of 1976, the nadir of the city's fiscal crisis, marked by widespread fires in vacant buildings in Harlem and elsewhere in New York's poorer neighborhoods. When an 11-year-old boy is seriously injured by a seemingly random firebombing, Carney is moved to ask himself, "What kind of man torches a building with people inside?" He resolves to find out with Pepper's help. What recurs in each of these episodes are vivid depictions of hustlers of varied races and social strata, whether old-hand thieves, crass showbiz types, remorseless killers, or slick politicians on the make with the business elite. Whitehead's gift for sudden, often grotesque eruptions of violence is omnipresent, so much so that you almost feel squeamish to recognize this book for the accomplished, streamlined, and darkly funny comedy of manners it is. If its spirits aren't quite as buoyant as those of Harlem Shuffle, it's because the era it chronicles was depressed in more ways than one. Assuming Whitehead continues chronicling Ray Carney's life and times, things should perk up, or amp up, for the 1980s. It's not just crime fiction at its craftiest, but shrewdly rendered social history. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Harlem furniture-store owner, family man, and sometimes crook Ray Carney had been keeping it clean. But in 1971, when his daughter begs for tickets to see the Jackson Five, Carney contacts a dirty cop and gets dragged back into the violent underworld. Whitehead continues the ensnaring, ingenious, mordantly funny, and profoundly revelatory crime saga begun in Harlem Shuffle (2021), digging even deeper into the city's corruption, from gang wars to a battle between rival fried-chicken restaurants to alliances among politicians, insurance companies, fixers, and arsonists in the grand racket known as urban renewal. Carney's archly cynical narration alternates with the blunt yet philosophical musings of his cohort Pepper, who tries to abide by his "crook manifesto." Then there's Zippo, shooting scenes for his Blaxploitation flick, Code Name: Nefertiti, at Carney's store and stirring up more trouble. Directing a spectacularly vivid cast that includes motley criminals and Carney's rock-steady wife and sweet kids and nephew, Whitehead tracks various strategies for survival in a city engulfed in fiery chaos. Culminating in 1976, this saturated tale is laced with caustic commentary on everything from the paradoxes Black artists face to the ludicrous commercialization of the Bicentennial. Whitehead captures the menace and the beauty of the city in exhilarating detail within the many-faceted, rollicking plot that propels his second, magnificently vibrant and transcendent Ray Carney novel.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Readers will hunt for any new book by Whitehead, but the newest in his Harlem saga will be sought with particular zeal.
Library Journal Review
Whitehead brings back furniture salesman Ray Carney in this equally ambitious follow-up to Harlem Shuffle, moving the action to the grimy 1970s in a triptych of stories. In the first, Carney, who has gone legit since the events of the first novel, seeks red-hot Jackson 5 tickets for his daughter but soon realizes that the path to Madison Square Garden runs through a corrupt cop. In the second, Carney's associate Pepper works security on a blaxploitation film whose star has gone missing, a darkly amusing story that allows Whitehead to comment on the commodification of Black art. In the final section, set during the Bicentennial celebrations of 1976, Ray and Pepper look for the arsonist who lit up an apartment, introducing a political angle to the novel. As in the first installment of this planned trilogy, Carney lives in a world where everyone is a potential mark and playing it straight is a sucker's game. The real star is Harlem, with troubles that seem more buried than during the tumultuous 1960s but are always a moment's notice from boiling over. VERDICT This isn't the rollicking caper its predecessor was, but it's still a worthy addition to one of the most distinguished oeuvres in modern fiction.--Michael Pucci