A review by seeceeread
Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead

3.75

The line between the stylish and the pimpified was unstable, ill-defined but everyone was having too much fun to complain.

Ray Carney is in it again.

This time, "it" is accidentally helping a rogue white detective rip off NYC's heavyhitters because he really wants to give his daughter Jackson 5 tickets. A quick tip to the Black Liberation Army saves his behind. "It" is lending his furniture store as the site of a Blaxploitation film headed by a pyromaniac, whose main star goes missing. (No problem; Carney's solid contact, Pepper, is the movie's security-cum-finder who trips into the role of hit man for one of the city's biggest crime bosses.) "It" is trying to tamp down his seething while his wife campaigns for the man her father wanted her to marry ... as Carney also realizes the man is running a massive fires-insurance-development scam, raking in hush envelopes from all parties.

Whitehead said just as he finished 𝗛𝗮𝗿𝗹𝗲𝗺 𝗦𝗵𝘂𝗳𝗳𝗹𝗲, he started this work that takes the series into the next decade. This feels a bit rushed compared to what I'm used to from him: more plot focus than other books; more straightforward social commentary; more accessible diction. I don't think it suffers from any of this – and in fact, probably makes Shuffle / Manifesto more appealing to wider audiences – but I was surprised.

Whispers of former books pop up, beyond the obvious prequel: summers in Sag Harbor, advertising, poker. Whitehead is boldly his own protagonist, again. And the book's jaded undercurrents perhaps reflect his own hardening stance, the immovable schist he's built around. The author often gives me the sense of playfulness at the level of sentence. This feels like a harder jab at society, at how "crooked stays crooked" ... and no matter which angle we case from, the longer we look, the more we find that it's all askew. I like the edginess and Whitehead's perpetual insouciance, even as he carefully decides which pop culture references should stud the text.