06/05/2023

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)

A Best Book of the Year: The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, NPR, Esquire, BookPage


“Dazzling … a glorious and intricate anatomy of the heist, the con and the slow game … [Whitehead] 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.”
—Walter Mosley, New York Times Book Review (cover)

“Whitehead’s New York of the ‘70s is a fully realized universe down to the most meticulous details (Parts of “Crook Manifesto” would pair nicely with Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker”) … Crook Manifesto” and “Harlem Shuffle” also form a joint 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. They have the pulpy verve of Harlem’s crime fiction godfather, Chester Himes, combined with the literary heft of Whitehead’s more garlanded novels.”
—Los Angeles Times

 “Remarkable…For all its slapstick fun, this project also contains the same gravitas as August Wilson’s seminal 10-play Century Cycle about Black life in Pittsburgh … When Carney is reflecting, attempting to better understand how Black Harlemites and Black Americans have survived before and will survive again, Whitehead is at his best. It makes this story feel important, not just entertaining, not just suspenseful, not just another surefire bestseller from a beloved author. These are crime novels, yes; funny and fast-paced. They are also the first two installments of a grand historical epic. Novel writing at its best. Bigger and better, together, than anything Whitehead has written before.” —The Washington Post
 
“Whitehead's flair for texture is as sharp as ever…Ray, May, Elizabeth and Pepper in particular are by turns exasperating and aspirational. Life gets thrown at them, and they throw themselves back in return. These are people you crave to catch up with, and in Whitehead's hands, the vast and intangible forces of society, injustice, morality, survival and love are distilled in them.”
—NPR

“Through brilliantly constructed twists and turns, set in a vibrantly detailed 1970s New York City, Whitehead once again demonstrates his prowess as an author whose work can stand out in any genre. His latest crime novel is simultaneously sharp, funny, and full of heart—and an elegant portrait of Harlem and its residents.”
—Time

“In this stylish social novel for the twenty-first century, Whitehead soars to new heights.” —Esquire

“[A] masterwork of stylish noir and social satire ... Whitehead's larger project propels us forward, probing the whipsaw of race and the ouroboros of virtue and vice.”
—Minneapolis Star-Tribune
 
“A dazzling sequel to Harlem Shuffle ... Two-time Pulitzer-winning author Whitehead shows no sign of resting on his laurels. Crook Manifesto continues the brilliantly realized 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.” —The Guardian
 
“Fierce and glorious ... Sentence by brilliant, funny sentence, a masterpiece” —People

“[Whitehead] combines the crime caper form with the Dickensian social novel and powers it all with a turbo charge of humor and a rich Harlem setting.” —Tampa Bay Times

05/01/2023

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

With his mesmerizing and versatile voice, Dion Graham masterfully narrates the second book in Whitehead's Harlem Trilogy, featuring reformed criminal Ray Carney. Graham perfectly complements Whitehead's intricate and beautifully written portrayal of 1970s Harlem--a time marred by police and political corruption, racial tension, and a city descending into chaos. Carney, a landlord, proud furniture store owner, and family man, is reluctantly drawn back into the criminal underworld by a violent and corrupt police detective. Graham's skillful narration brings the characters, regardless of gender or ethnic background, to life, capturing their diverse personalities. This audiobook immerses listeners in the palpable fear and darkness of urban life during that time while also revealing an individual's relentless pursuit of a better existence. E.Q. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

★ 2023-04-12
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.