Literary fiction annotation: Crook Manifesto

Author:   Colson Whitehead

Title:      Crook Manifesto

Genre:   Literary Fiction

Publication Date:  2023

Number of pages:  319

Geographical Setting: Harlem, N.Y., USA

Time Period:  1970’s

Series: yes, second of the Harlem trilogy

Plot Summary:  Former fence Ray Carney returns from Harlem Shuffle, older, out of the crime game and the owner of a furniture store. Until his daughter wants Jackson Five tickets and Carney is drawn into a deadly scheme enacted by a crooked cop. Two years later, Carney’s partner Pepper produces a Blaxploitation film rife with setbacks. Three years after that, Carney and Pepper try to make sense of the frequent fires going up in bicentennial Harlem, including one that killed a neighbor child. Rich descriptions of Harlem, its characters and characteristics tie these three stories together as illustrative of an era and a place that is unique in American history.

Subject Headings:

Harlem–fiction

African Americans–fiction

Blaxploitation–fiction

Crime–fiction

Appeal:

• Setting:  Harlem the neighborhood is as much a character as the individuals that comprise it. Harlem of the time was filled with criminals in and out of law enforcement, small shops and restaurants, run-down apartment buildings, fancy clubs, and a broad cast of characters that embody the neighborhood.

• Language:  Whitehead is an artful writer, waxing poetic as narrator, capturing the cadence and slang of 1970’s Harlem (read aloud beautifully by Dion Graham on the audiobook).

• Time Frame: Set in 1971, 1973, and 1976, each segment of the book deals with politics, crime, Black entertainment, family, housing, and fashion of the era. 

Three terms that best describe the book: Gritty, humorous, descriptive

Three relevant non-fiction works and authors (why are they similar?)

• Harlem is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts

Rhodes-Pitts explores 100 years of Harlem, highlighting both the famous and the average residents of a storied community rich with its own culture and history. An acclaimed autobiography, the author chronicles her own life and the life of Harlem itself as gentrification threatens its identity. In Whitehead’s novel and Rhodes-Pitts’ autobiography, Harlem is treated almost as its own character with a rich backstory and colorful residents.

• Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras: A History of Blaxploitation Cinema, Odie Henderson

Film Critic Henderson fondly reviews Blaxploitation classics like Shaft and SuperFly. These films were critiqued for promoting negative stereotypes of African Americans but were box office hits for Black Americans who wanted to see Black actors playing strong characters. Henderson celebrates the genre while pointing out its misogyny and other flaws. Whitehead’s Nefertiti TNT is typical of Blaxploitation films of the 1970’s

• The Harlem Reader: A Celebration of New York’s Most Famous Neighborhood, From the Renaissance Years to the Twenty-first Century, edited by Herb Boyd

This anthology of essays, poems, fiction, memoir, and more portrays Harlem as celebrated as well as despised. The Reader shares accounts by famous and everyday citizens, capturing the multifaceted neighborhood in all its contradictions and its rich history.

Three relevant fiction works and authors:

• Deacon King Kong, James McBride

Set in 1969 Brooklyn, this novel too treats the character of a whole community as antagonist. Both novels are gritty, funny, dark, and hopeful.

• Carmen and Grace, Melissa Coss Aquino

A crime novel that is also social commentary, Carmen and Grace focuses on how crime infiltrates the Latin areas of the Bronx in the 2000’s, compared to Whitehead’s crime-infested Harlem of the 1970’s.

• Blacktop Wasteland, S.A. Cosby

Both novels feature characters driven to complete one last crime in their violent African American communities.