CROOK MANIFESTO by Colson Whitehead

It’s the 1970s, and Ray Carney has retired from fencing stolen goods, but now he needs to score sold-out Jackson Five concert tickets for his daughter.  Really?  Pair that with the “one last job” plot, and I’m not exactly on board.  The author mashes together several other plots, several years apart, and I found the book very difficult to follow.  Ray is not even as prominent a character as his friend Pepper, who serves as security guard, crime solver, and locater of missing persons.  Arson is rampant throughout Harlem during this time period apparently, thanks to firebugs like a movie director named Zippo, for obvious reasons, and corrupt politicians who line their pockets with urban renewal kickbacks.  The cops are all on the take, of course, but when they started murdering each other, I was taken aback.  The setting may be bleak, but Colson Whitehead is still quite a wordsmith, and I marvel at some of the dynamite sentences he creates.  On page 15, he writes, “He conjured the lonely scene awaiting Foster at home. . .hoisting squealing grandchildren all day like barbells.”   Then on page 195, he says, “Then again, Pepper himself had visited ten of these United States—eleven if you count Connecticut. . .   A cup of coffee costs the same all over and the person who serves it is miserable in the same way. . .”.  Still, great sentences do not necessarily make a great novel, and I just prefer something that hangs together a little better.