REVIEW: CROOK MANIFESTO
Two things tend to happen when a writer rises to the top of their craft. Either a mix of experience and perhaps confidence leads to assured but ultimately uninteresting work or else that author brings that confidence to new stories and new means of telling them. There's an aliveness to inexperience that's difficult to maintain, and there's nothing quite like reading this latter type of writer who's able to keep that vivacity. Colson Whitehead is such a writer. About twenty-five years into his career, his shelves no doubt bowing from accolades, Whitehead still feels new, excited and wondering and explorative, but with the experience to fully exploit that vigor.
Crook Manifesto is the follow-up to Harlem Shuffle. That first novel followed Ray Carney as he attempted to find the balance between criminality and legitimacy--a day self and a night self--in an effort to better his life. When his cousin gets mixed up in an ill-advised heist, that balance gets disastrously tipped. Taking place over five years, the novel set its stride to the progress of the city of New York, and the country itself. Crook Manifesto picks back up with Carney in 1971. He's been trying to straighten out his crooked for a few years, but his desperate attempt to get ungettable Jackson 5 tickets for his daughter snatches him back into the world of his former night self. "Slip once and everybody is glad to help you slip hard. Crooked stays crooked and bent hates straight. The rest is survival."
Unlike Harlem Shuffle, Crook Manifesto wanders a bit. Instead of directly following Carney through multiple years, it uses its preferred convention of time jumping to offer up three novellas set in this world. In the first book, Whitehead created a rich but implied underworld, and in the second he explores and broadens that cast and catchment. Over its three sections, the novel functions a little bit like the seasons of The Wire, where crime and criminality is explored as an ecosystem in which the seemingly separate echelons of society of wrongdoing feed into one another.
Over the two books, Whitehead matches the stride of his story with the rise and decline of New York City. While the end of Harlem Shuffle sees the very beginning of work on what will become the Twin Towers--as sturdy a symbol of American Exceptionalism until they weren't--Crook Manifesto charts the somewhat random, somewhat controlled demolition of New York by fire. Professional criminals and criminal professionals are turning the city to cinder, cashing in on whatever phoenixes out of that rubble.
"Crime isn't a scourge," Whitehead writes, "people are. Crime is just how folks talk to each other sometimes."
It's clear the affection Whitehead has for the world and period of criminality, the lingo and the logic and the ethics, grappling with whether there's a right way to do the wrong thing--ie, a crook's manifesto. Perhaps it's the passion supported by skill that makes these books feel new and old all at once, the work of both a young writer excited about absolutely everything and an experienced one able to cohere that scope.
