Crook Manifesto<\/strong><\/em>
Colson Whitehead<\/strong>
Fleet, $32.99<\/strong><\/p>\n
Colson Whitehead is known for trying out new things, but in Crook Manifesto<\/em> the new thing he tries out is a return to an old thing. He\u2019s written a sequel to his last book, Harlem Shuffle<\/em>, a \u201960s-set crime yarn centring on the full-time furniture salesman and part-time fence, Ray Carney, whose aspirational right hand tried to pretend it didn\u2019t know what his other, grimier hand was doing.<\/p>\n Superior thrills ensued: Whitehead had perfected the art of combining historical crime fiction and the social novel, and it\u2019s not surprising he wanted to continue in this vein. With material this rich it was hard to believe Harlem Shuffle<\/em> was the last we would hear of those characters and that world.<\/p>\n In his latest novel Colson Whitehead tries something new \u2013 a sequel to his previous work, Harlem Shuffle.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Simone Padovani<\/cite><\/p>\n Harlem Shuffle<\/em> left off in 1964; Crook Manifesto<\/em> picks up the thread in 1971, the start of the decade that made New York a byword for squalor and danger, a period now grown so distant it has become an object of dark nostalgia \u2013 SoHo! Times Square! Chelsea Piers! \u2013 like Weimar Berlin or Victorian London. (See The Deuce<\/em>; see The Flamethrowers<\/em>.)<\/p>\n Whitehead doesn\u2019t indulge his nostalgia, and Crook Manifesto<\/em> hasn\u2019t quite the high spirits of its predecessor: fedoras and faux fur notwithstanding, not to mention black power, one would have to be nihilistically, even psychopathically keen on the aesthetics of decay to get much joy from \u201970s Harlem. The book is still highly readable, though, just not quite as much fun. If Harlem Shuffle<\/em> was a caper, Crook Manifesto<\/em> is an apocalypse.<\/p>\n Colson Whitehead\u2019s latest novel.<\/span>Credit: <\/span> <\/cite><\/p>\n It has the same tripartite structure as its predecessor, with three different, related stories in each section and each section jumping forward a couple of years. When the first opens Carney has gone straight, and thinks the word is out. He doesn\u2019t know, though, what every consumer of crime fiction knows: when a character announces he is out of the life, he is begging the plot to drag him back in. His old connection in the NYPD, Munson, does know this. \u201cCrooked stays crooked, and bent hates straight\u201d, and Munson isn\u2019t interested in any new leaf Carney might have turned.<\/p>\n The corruption in the force has become unignorable, at last. Clean cop Frank Serpico, soon to be incarnated by Al Pacino in a hit film, has blown the whistle, the subpoenas are raining down like confetti, and one has landed on Munson. He has decided he needs Carney\u2019s help to organise his escape from New York, and Carney goes along with it for the best family man reasons: Munson can get him all-but-unobtainable tickets to the Jackson Five concert Carney\u2019s daughter wants to go to. (Fewer high spirits, perhaps, but Crook Manifesto<\/em> isn\u2019t solemn either.)<\/p>\n For the middle section Whitehead starts to get meta. It\u2019s 1973. Zippo, the blue photographer from Harlem Shuffle<\/em>, has resurfaced as a blaxploitation movie director, and is filming scenes from Code Name: Nefertiti<\/em> in Carney\u2019s showroom. Lucinda Cole, no more than a name in the previous novel, here stars in the movie and on the page.<\/p>\n It\u2019s the moment of a new form of black celebrity, race-conscious and undeferential: woke, in fact, in the original sense of the word. Along with Zippo and Cole we are introduced to a hip young black comedian, Roscoe Pope \u2013 initials shared with Richard Pryor \u2013 wowing whitey with his jive in clubs down the Village. Whitehead makes sure to note that this flowering of black male pride comes with a sizeable dollop of misogyny: Pope is charismatic and funny, but some of his behaviour is pretty unsavoury.<\/p>\n Carney just about vanishes from the second section, and Whitehead gives the book over to its most compelling character, the small-time hood and hired muscle, Pepper. Stoical and dour and a bit on the mean side (\u201cI like plenty of folks, I just don\u2019t like people\u201d), he looks askance at pretty much everything, from the younger generation of blacks \u201cwith their eye-melting clothing and their tiresome, uplifting slogans\u201d, to the white hippie freaks working on Zippo\u2019s movie: \u201cFrankly, the racial harmony shit put Pepper on edge.\u201d<\/p>\n For much of the second and third parts Pepper is our guide, an ornery Virgil leading the reader through this borough of the inferno. He is a deflationary contrast to the blaxploitation flicks\u2019 superheroes \u2013 and to lairs such as Roscoe \u2013 though, in his own way, he is as stylised a figure as John Shaft or Superfly\u2019s<\/em> Youngblood Priest (well, maybe not that stylised).<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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