The two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author of Harlem Shuffle continues his Harlem saga in a novel that summons 1970s New York in all its seedy glory. It's 1971, 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.
Crook Manifesto is a dazzling treatise, a glorious and intricate anatomy of the heist, the con and the slow game. There’s an element of crime here, certainly, but as in Whitehead’s previous books, genre isn’t the point. Here he uses the crime novel as a lens to investigate the mechanics of a singular neighborhood at a particular tipping point in time. He has it right: the music, the energy, the painful calculus of loss. Structured into three time periods — 1971, 1973 and finally the year of America’s bicentennial celebration, 1976 — Crook Manifesto gleefully detonates its satire upon this world while getting to the heart of the place and its people ... Whitehead bends language. He makes sinuous the sounds of a city and its denizens pushing against the boundaries. He can be mordantly funny.
Both deceptively substantive and sneakily funny, a wise journey through Harlem days and nights as lived by Ray Carney, a conscientious furniture salesman and family man who happens to run a little crooked ... Whitehead has always had a sharp instinct for the workings of culture ... Whitehead’s New York of the ‘70s is a fully realized universe down to the most meticulous details, from the constant sirens and bodega drug fronts to a sweltering, abandoned biscuit factory ... A...reminder, as if we still needed one, that crime fiction can be great literature. These books are as resonant and finely observed as anything Whitehead has written.
Whitehead’s ironic, biting humor is laced throughout Crook Manifesto ... Thinking of Harlem Shuffle as a loving pastiche of Chester Himes’s crime novels, perhaps we can read Crook Manifesto as a Blaxploitation farce like Sidney Poitier’s ’70s action-comedies, Uptown, Saturday Night and Let’s Do It Again. Though neither novel is experimental, Whitehead has imposed narrative constraints that challenge him to develop and maintain formal symmetry among the sections. Unfortunately this decision dilutes his plotting in parts two and three of the new book. But luckily, because of Whitehead’s blazing wit, striking cultural intelligence, and special storytelling talent, Crook Manifesto overcomes its flaws.
