Review: Crooked hero in 'Crook Manifesto' learns that getting Jackson 5 tickets is not as easy as A-B-C

Ray Carney, we want you back!

Last autumn, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Colson Whitehead revealed that his next novel would pick up "Harlem Shuffle"'s characters and narrative strands on the way to a trilogy that tracks Carney, his morally and legally compromised protagonist, as he treks across a city fallen from grace, a New York caught in a feedback loop of transgression, corruption and poverty. "Crook Manifesto" — Whitehead's captivating, sardonic second installment — builds on the previous book's shenanigans while fleshing out Carney as both saint and sinner. Everyone in his uptown orbit is a Janus-faced scammer.

Like "Shuffle," Whitehead structures "Crook Manifesto" as a triptych that segues from 1971 to 1973 to the Disneyfied bicentennial year. At first blush, Carney seems the bourgeois paterfamilias who has made it to Strivers Row — married to the increasingly tetchy Elizabeth, a couple of teenagers in tow and his fencing days in the rearview mirror. His furniture business is thriving. His daughter's longing for Jackson 5 tickets tips him back into crime, though, putting his quest to be a good father and husband in jeopardy.

The opening section portrays Carney's noirish, frenzied pursuit of those tickets; that he's ultimately successful comes at a huge cost in blood and treasure. An array of gangsters stalk him, guns ablaze, along with venal white cop Munson. One sequence, triggered by a craps game gone wrong, unfolds with the balletic, gore-aplenty skill of Tarantino at his best.

Part two brings back the auteur Zippo, filming a Blaxploitation flick; Lucinda Cole, a struggling actor; and Carney's friend Pepper, hired as a security guard on the shoot.

Pepper may well be the book's true protagonist. He corrals a crowd of onlookers: "His technique: glaring with his arms loosely crossed; lifting a skeptical eyebrow when civilians got too close to the perimeter; the occasional grunt to warm someone off. He was a six-foot frown molded by black magic into human form."

Cole's sudden disappearance kicks the drama into high gear, and it's a joy to follow Pepper as he bird-dogs Cole through seedy bars and comedy clubs.

The third section depicts Harlem on fire, corruption still rampant, and Carney and Pepper teamed up, trying to do the right thing, with or without the law on their side: "There are always secret rackets underway that you know nothing about, even as they run your life. One racket brought mayhem, like the scams and rip-offs steering the city into decline, and another invisible racket held everything up so things didn't completely go to hell."

"Crook Manifesto" is a dense read, heavy on irony and grim humor; Whitehead bricks his sentences thickly, much like Carney lining his safe with wads of cash. The novel can be read as a stand-alone but requires some familiarity with "Harlem Shuffle." Whitehead's larger project propels us forward, probing the whipsaw of race and the ouroboros of virtue and vice.

As Carney observes wryly, "Crooked stays crooked and bent hates straight. The rest is survival."

Hamilton Cain reviews fiction and nonfiction for a range of venues, including the New York Times Book Review and Washington Post. Next month, he'll review "The Bee Sting" by Paul Murray. Cain lives in Brooklyn.

Crook Manifesto

By: Colson Whitehead.

Publisher: Doubleday, 320 pages, $29.