Crook Manifesto: A Novel

Crook Manifesto is full of violence, cruelty, horror, pathos, and it is funny. The book sings with Colson Whitehead’s always delightful and headshaking prose.

The book is the second installment of a trilogy that began with Harlem Shuffle. As with that book, there is sociology, economics, politics, culture and people far from the everyday life of readers who seldom if ever walk the streets of uptown New York City. Many of the characters are familiar from the first book but the depth of the people in this go-round exhibit more substance and the tale is more complex.

Harlem Shuffle was set in the 1960s. Crook Manifesto, to be published in July, is set in the 1970s, still in Harlem. The apex of the trilogy will bring readers front and center with Harlem in the 1980s, but who knows the focus Whitehead will bring to its pages.

Crook Manifesto begins in 1971. Ray Carney, the owner of Carney’s Furniture readers met in Harlem Shuffle, is trying to escape his past as a fence, a practice mingled with the legitimacy of selling dining room sets, living room sofas, recliners and more. He hopes his ability to find buyers for the “rugs that fell off the truck,” and other items of greater value, is history.

He, his wife and two children have moved up in the world. Gone with the past is the flat next to the elevated train to a brownstone on Striver’s Row and a love/hate membership in the Dumas Club where the professional Black men of means gather. The club where deals are made, advantages are solidified, power is protected and pleasure is found, all under the glow of respectability.

Carney’s store has grown to the point he doesn’t need to supplement its income with a side door or worry about giving weekly envelopes of cash to the cop on the beat to look the other way. Carney is successful and legitimate.

Life is complex, however, and Whitehead does not write with clichés. He puts fiction on the pages, surely not far from the truth of the streets. His daughter wants Jackson 5 concert tickets, not available by standard means. Munson, that cop on the beat with envelopes stuffed in his pockets, is the agent to see for the scarce stubs with seat and row numbers needed for access. A favor asked, of course, requires one in return. The violence that ensues, at times, seems almost gratuitous but read on, the story evolves.

Pepper, Carney’s and his father’s partner in earlier crimes, is back. He is a brutal man who found normalized violence and killings in World War II, but he has a streak of decency, of right and wrong, of loyalty; he’s Uncle Pepper to Carney’s children. His character is well developed, taking center stage in 1973, the middle section of the novel. A Black liberation group appears and Carney cajoles Pepper to work security for a blaxploitation film that uses Carney’s furniture showroom for some of its scenes. The crime boss of Harlem and his enforces return as well, the beautiful star of the movie the fulcrum of the action. The curtains hiding intertwined lives open as the story line builds steam.

The pages move on to 1976, with city politics, arson, insurance kickbacks and the exploitation embedded there, come to the fore. One of those fires comes close to Carney and prompts him to put Pepper on the who-did-it trail. All of this while Carney’s wife, a successful travel agent, volunteers on the campaign of a childhood friend from Striver’s Row who is running for City Council president.

The City Council candidate, a former district attorney, projects a reformist, progressive persona. Carney wonders, though, as the fires of apartment buildings, warehouses and abandoned homes go up in flames, again and again and again. Fists fly, guns shoot, knives cut, baseball bats and crowbars swing, as boots stomp bodies. Blood flows. Again, again and again. The twists and turns and many characters, from thugs to bartenders to a crazed firebug, to Pepper, Carney and the candidate, require the reader to pay attention, but that’s not hard. The pages turn easily and quickly.

The book is much more than a shoot-em-up, violent tale. Carney’s wife, their children, a nephew, the tenants of an apartment Carney owns and, yes, Pepper, bring a human side to the pages. One side of Carney is crooked and Pepper is never too far from actualizing crookedness and brutality. Amidst the mayhem, however, there is humor and loyalty to family and others who live within and beyond the dark reality of corruption, intentional fires, violence and murder.

This is a good book and one that requires the reader to pay attention as the characters are many, come in and out of the plot and are all intertwined during the 1970s. Presumably, they, or their shadows, will resurface in the 1980s book, which is scheduled to complete Whitehead’s trilogy. Crook Manifesto is another worthy example of his talent as a novelist. He is a wonderful storyteller!