Colson Whitehead, “Crook Manifesto”

 

I’ve been looking forward to Crook Manifesto, the sequel to Colson Whitehead’s great novel Harlem Shuffle. The publication date was Wednesday, so in preparation, I reread Harlem Shuffle, and liked it just as much as I did the first time. Unfortunately, I am finding the sequel somewhat disappointing. It’s a pretty good book, full of action, comic detail, and accurate descriptions of life in Harlem during the 1970s, but it doesn’t reach the high standard of the first volume or of the two other brilliant novels by Whitehead that I have read -- The Underground Railroad, The Nickel Boys. (The three first books were blogged here, here, and here) 

Whitehead's main character, an entrepreneur by day and a fence for various thieves and burglars by night, is named Carney. In Harlem Shuffle he's the center of all three individual stories. In some ways, he is an Everyman: Whitehead seems to view him simultaneously as an individual and a representative of a type of man of his time. For this, Carney reminded me of Langston Hughes' character Simple and his penetrating and seemingly naive views of Harlem in the 1950s. 

Carney is complex and we know what's in his head in Harlem Shuffle, but not so much in Crook Manifesto. He's not the center of the stories any more, which dilutes the effect of knowing his conflicts over honest business and family loyalty versus his criminal side gig. He is loyal to his wife Elizabeth, who comes from a higher social stratum than he does, and to his children, but neither book presents Elizabeth as a fully-realized character. In reading Crook Manifesto, I felt that this omission was even more troubling.

One of the three stories in Crook Manifesto features Pepper, Carney's shady associate and family friend. Pepper is not as complex or thoughtful as Carney, so his story is more of a crime drama with historic asides than the richer drama of knowing how Carney thinks. It's not at all bad, in fact quite exciting, but just not as deep as Harlem Shuffle, in my opinion.

Both books have a strong awareness of Harlem history. Harlem Shuffle does it delicately and discretely, but Crook Manifesto is somewhat obsessed about injustice and government amplification of Black poverty as well as about a number of other issues that emerged in the 1970s. The underlying reasons for unequal results between Black and White people may have been obvious at that time; however, the characters' language at times seems too much like a present-day New York Times editorial about racially-based economic discrimination. In some passages, I found that the choice of words seemed more appropriate for a twenty-first century writer than for the characters in the novel who speak them. Also, the length of their socioeconomic analysis can be longwinded and a bit pompous: in Harlem Shuffle, Whitehead shows you how social conditions affected the characters; in Crook Manifesto, he lectures you about it. Here's a quote from a character in the novel that shows what I have in mind:

"Before the current fiscal crisis and all the cutbacks, Pierce said, there were decades of urban renewal projects that obliterated communities and industrial zones in the name of progress. 'Ramming the highways through, bulldozing so-called slums, but they were places people lived—black, white, Puerto Rican. Knock down the factories and warehouses, and you wipe out people’s livelihoods, too. The white people take advantage of those new highways out to the suburbs and flee the city into homes subsidized by federal mortgage programs. Mortgages that black people won’t get. And the blacks and Puerto Ricans are squeezed into smaller and smaller ghettos that were once thriving neighborhoods. But now those good blue-collar jobs are gone. Can’t buy a house because the lenders have designated the neighborhood as high-risk—the redlining actually creates the conditions it’s warning against. Unemployment, overcrowded tenements, and you get overwhelmed social services. It’s started—the breakdown... it’s years of shitty urban planning biting us in the ass. You see it in Harlem,' Pierce said." (Crook Manifesto pp. 257-258). 

Colson Whitehead is a genius at making people and events come to life -- all of the four books of his that I've read are brilliantly written with a fantastic sense of timing and sense of humor. Crook Manifesto has lots of this writing, but unfortunately in some instances, I found it to be somewhat overdone, and not just for ironic or comic effect. Here's a paragraph about a Harlem restaurant run by a woman from the south known as Lady Betsy. Carney eats there one day, and his thoughts are merged with the history of the place. It's brilliant -- but flashy. 

"In the midst of the daily Jim Crow tribulations and humiliations, Lady Betsy’s family had assembled the instructions for an eternal feast. A refreshing scorpion spike of heat lay hidden in the collards, and the mac and cheese was a symphony of competing textures, but the chicken was divine, fried in the very skillet of heaven. The house dredge was no mere spicy dusting of cornmeal but a crispy concoction of buttermilk, flour, and dream stuff. To penetrate that wall of batter and gain the meat inside was to storm the keep of pleasure. Local politicians and famous songsmiths posed with the owner in photographs, amid framed citations and plaques from the spectrum of Harlem organizations—the big, the small, and the spurious. A tour bus used to make a special trip uptown and white people from all over the country—perhaps kin to the same white people who had persecuted Lady Betsy down South—poured out of the vehicle to partake, until an incident in which a neighborhood rummy exposed himself in an especially aggressive anatomical display. That put an end to the anthropology." (Crook Manifesto pp. 170-171). 

Harlem has been central in American Black history for at least a century, and I like to think of Whitehead as a superb present-day writer in a wonderful line of predecessors. For example, in 1925, literary scholar Alain Locke edited a book of essays, poetry, and other writing by Harlem authors titled The New Negro. It featured work by Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and many others in the Harlem Renaissance. Since that time, many authors have written fiction and essays set in Harlem. Just a few examples: Chester Himes' detective novels including Cotton Comes to Harlem, Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land, and James Baldwin's autobiographical writing such as Another Country. 

Although I wasn't thrilled by the newest Whitehead book, I consider him to be definitely one of the best current American authors and extremely worth reading.

Review © 2023 mae sander

Shared with the Sunday Salon at Readerbuzz