Reviewed by Patricia Simms-Reeve
Contemporary thrillers depict an aspect of lives that are ordered, sedate almost staid when compared with Harlem Shuffle and Colson Whitehead’s latest novel, Crook Manifesto.
Its pages cover the actions of people caught in a complex web of the struggle to survive by any means available to them, be it violence, murder, schemes doomed to failure and corruption in many forms.
Great novelists like Dickens portrayed myriad characters and exposed their endless struggles. Colson Whitehead does this but with clever tempering of the harsh reality with unflagging wit. Pepper, Carney’s super strong associate and seasoned robber, entered a luxury living room and thought, he had never been in a room like this before that actually had people in it!
Carney has left the 60’s of Harlem Shuffle and it is now the New York of the 70s with Nixon as president, the warring factions of Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army, and thousands of tenements destroyed by fire. 1976 is the year for celebrating the bicentenary of Independence which is not appreciated by the black majority of Harlem.
Ray Carney works hard in his furnishings business and has hopes of forsaking his links to criminal pursuits. This soon evaporates when he decides to get tickets for a Jackson 5 concert for his daughter, May. His contact is Munson, a white cop who earns more from his illegal dealings than his regular salary. Munson is cold, ruthless and guilty of more than the villains he supposedly chases. He demands Carney fence some stolen jewels but this ends with his being beaten, robbed and forced to accompany Munson on his rampage through the poor sections of the city.
Good intentions forgotten, Ray is swept into the world of movies, a blaxploitation epic starring Lucinda Cole. She suddenly and inexplicably vanishes. Pepper appears and uses his ‘skills’ and ‘contacts’ to track her down.
The film-making of the second section of the book leads to the final 100 pages that describe a contrasting way to commemorate the 1776 War of Independence in the poor sections of the city. Firebombing is rampant, sometimes to clear abandoned buildings, or to aid the plans of the developers, but usually to collect insurance. An eleven-year-old is trapped in one of these burning buildings and this horrific incident makes Ray decide to discover the guilty arsonist.
Episodes follow where a cross section of the lower strata of a city is laid bare. There are hustlers of different races, seasoned thieves, sleazy politicians and corrupt practices saturating all levels ….the law-makers, guardians of those laws, the unskilled desperately looking for means to survive or even thrive.
Colson Whitehead’s Harlem and its surrounds is darkly brought to life and become a leading ‘character’ of the book. An energetic drive makes it compelling, as well as his incisive exposure of a society torn by forces often beyond control. The paintings of the Flemish artist Hieronymus Bosch depict peasants tied to the drudgery of rural life; Whitehead creates a kaleidoscope of a far more complex struggle. Lines are blurred so that few are immune from the contamination of crime in its many variants.
It is Pepper’s belief in the Crook Manifesto that guides him and Carney. They have a ‘hierarchy of crime’ – what is acceptable and what is not (those who don’t subscribe to this are cockroaches).
It takes time to slowly read and absorb the nuances, and to appreciate the understated but clever observations which form the basis of this subtle social commentary. It is the indisputable brilliance of the writing overall that make this one of the most deeply memorable books of recent times.
Crook Manifesto
[2023]
by Colson Whitehead
Hachette
ISBN 978 034972 765 3
$32.99; 314pp