There is a distinct feeling one gets while reading Tania James’ third novel: Someone needs to make this book into a movie. Steeped in the rich history of three nations and infused with a young man’s unshakable desire to do something grand, Loot is transportive storytelling at its best.
We begin in 1794, when India is still a nation of tiny kingdoms ruled by big egos, right on the cusp of British colonialism and the East India Company. India’s foremost king, Tipu Sultan, the Tiger of Mysore, is in his summer palace, conjuring yet another grand plan to impress his citizenry. His current fixation is to build a larger-than-life automaton of a growling tiger pouncing on a British soldier. To achieve this technological feat, Tipu calls on the expertise of 57-year-old Lucien du Leze, a homesick clockmaker and inventor who escaped the French Revolution only to find himself on the brink of another. Lucien in turn hires 17-year-old Abbas, the youngest son of a local woodworker and the heart of this story.
Abbas is kind, gentle and a bit rebellious. His woodcarving skills are unmatched, even though he doesn’t know that yet. Under Lucien’s tutelage, Abbas comes to terms with his gift and unearths his desire to use his craft to leave an unforgettable mark on the world. In that, he is much like his dreamy and determined king, but without the burden of defending the crown.
Tipu’s tiger automaton turns out to be a crowd-pleasing sensation, but not long after its unveiling, Tipu loses first his kingdom and then his life to the British. Lucien finds a way to escape to Rouen, France, leaving Abbas with an invitation to be his apprentice should he ever find a way to leave Mysore. The wooden tiger meets its own dreary fate as well, ending up in a musty, forgotten room in an old lady’s English castle. It’s the end of an era, but for Abbas, it’s just the beginning of an epic quest.
James’ plot is brilliant and unique, her creative liberties mixing well with the historical realities of colonialism and migration. Her supporting characters are woven with the same care and detail as her protagonist. All of this combines for a stimulating and informative novel, a must-read for adventurers, dreamers and lovers of history.
Tania James’ third novel is brilliant and unique, her creative liberties mixing well with the historical realities of colonialism and migration.
Claudia Cravens’ debut novel is a funny, sharp, subversive marvel: a queer Western that feels both fresh and timeless. With gunfights, gambling, mysterious strangers riding into town, criminal gangs and highway robbery, it has all the trappings of a classic Western. The plot takes off about two-thirds of the way through, and it delivers plenty of heart-pumping action and adventure. There’s more than one scene during which you might find yourself holding your breath. But what makes all of this action so compelling is the quiet buildup.
Alone and broke after her father dies from a snakebite, 16-year-old Bridget arrives in Dodge City, Kansas, exhausted, hungry and desperate for work. She finds it at the Buffalo Queen Saloon, a brothel run by two fierce but protective women. The Queen provides a kind of safety that Bridget has never known—steady money and a roof over her head—but it also makes her vulnerable to more than one kind of danger. When she falls in love with Spartan Lee, a legendary female gunfighter, Bridget realizes just how big the world truly is—and how much it will change her, if she lets it.
Though grounded in rich historical detail, Lucky Red reads at times like a modern coming-of-age story. Bridget’s new life as a “sporting woman” provides her with a fast education—in friendship and first love, in loss and betrayal, in what it means to stand up for herself and those she cares about. Cravens relates all of these internal revelations and outward discoveries in Bridget’s brash, no-nonsense, take-things-as-they-come narrative voice.
Through Bridget, Cravens captures the daily rhythms of a Kansas brothel in the 1870s with incredible care and nuance. There’s nothing sensational or dramatic about it. There’s only the honest depiction of the textures of ordinary life: the endless string of tricks that blur into each other; the petty squabbles between the women; the acts of loyalty and friendship that keep them alive; the bawdy jokes and moments of private amusement; the drudgery of chores; the ache of a hangover after a night of drinking and the pleasure of a hot cup of coffee.
Lucky Red is a complicated and moving portrait of a young queer woman determined to take up space in a world trying to render her invisible. Bridget often finds herself in situations without any good choices, and she sometimes pursues a course of action that causes harm, or makes messes—and isn’t that what it means to grow up? At its heart, this novel is a thrilling but contemplative meditation on the courage it takes to choose—yourself, your freedom, your pleasure, your home—and own the consequences.
There’s more than one scene of Claudia Craven’s queer Western during which you might find yourself holding your breath. But what makes all of this action so compelling is the quiet buildup.
Susie Finkbeiner (All Manner of Things) invites readers along on the inspiring journey of a young baseball player who dreams of playing for the first women’s professional baseball league in the adeptly crafted coming-of-age novel The All-American.
To the disappointment of her mother, and despite her home economics teacher’s warnings against future spinsterhood, Bertha Harding has no interest in mastering domestic skills like the other girls. Bertha’s true passion is baseball, and the 1952 season of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) is about to begin. Bertha can hardly wait to see the Workington Sweet Peas play, but she fears that her hopes of playing for the team are crushed when her father is accused of being a member of the Communist Party. Her family flees Detroit to her uncle’s home in a small town in Michigan. Still, Bertha remains hopeful, and in time, her journey with the Sweet Peas begins.
Told through the voices of Bertha and her sister, Flossie, The All-American offers an intimate glimpse into their lives and the challenges they face. Fitting in at school is tough for both of them, thanks to Bertha’s lack of interest in marriage and Flossie’s struggle to make friends. But their lives expand through the bonds they forge: Bertha’s love of baseball is supported by the Sweet Peas pitcher, and Flossie learns true friendship and empathy from her friend Lizzie.
Captivating historical details contextualize the story and add conflict and tension. The Red Scare casts a shadow over everyone’s lives, straining relationships and fomenting fear of tarnished relationships. Finkbeiner also includes fascinating background information on the AAGPBL, offering a beautiful celebration of the women who broke barriers for other girls and women in baseball.
Led by relatable characters, The All-American is a moving novel, fit for inspiring any reader to dream big and believe that anything is possible.
Susie Finkbeiner offers a beautiful celebration of the women who broke barriers for other girls and women in baseball.
There should be a special word for when readers become so thoroughly engrossed in a book that they can hardly put it down—and are jolted, even bereft, when it comes to an end. Captivated comes close but doesn’t completely convey the experience of reading The Postcard from French writer and actor Anne Berest. Already an international bestseller, it’s a unique piece of autofiction that unfolds like a thriller while seamlessly addressing a number of hefty social issues past and present.
Like the author, the novel’s Anne Berest is the great-granddaughter of artist Francis Picabia and French Resistance fighter Gabriele Buffet-Picabia. But Anne knows little about her maternal grandmother Myriam except that she was Jewish and lost her family in concentration camps. The topic is rarely discussed, and Anne doesn’t think much about it until one day when her young daughter remarks, “They don’t like Jews very much at school.”
Shaken to her core, Anne can hardly address the subject. Instead, she suddenly remembers a strange, anonymous postcard that her mother had received years earlier, in 2003. The front showed a photo of the Opéra Garnier in Paris; the back contained the names of Myriam’s parents, Ephraim and Emma, and siblings, Noémie and Jacques, all of whom died at Auschwitz in 1942.
Anne becomes determined to find out who sent the postcard, though she’s uncertain whether the sender’s intentions were honorable or menacing, “waiting, as they had been for decades, patiently, for me to come looking for them.” She partners with her chain-smoking mother to investigate, hopping into her mother’s messy car, and little by little, their efforts pay off and details emerge, which Berest shares in fictionalized scenes, creating dialogue and details while sticking to the facts as closely as possible. As her mother says, “It’s incredible how much is still there in the archives, like an underground world, a parallel world, still alive. Like the embers of a fire . . . all you have to do is blow on them to rekindle the flame.”
The rekindling is unsettling, and Berest’s moving storytelling brings her ancestors’ story to life in dramatic, artful ways, often interspersing historical events with running discussions between mother and daughter. They uncover an epic, tragic tale that spans the globe, including Russia, Latvia, Poland, France, the United States and Palestine. Although Ephraim had taken note of the growing dangers to Jews in Europe, he was determined to become a French citizen, and in so doing, “He’d allowed himself to become inextricably entangled in a situation from which there was no escape, trapped by rising waters while he simply stood there and watched them rise.”
As Anne and her mother explore their past, the author notices a number of coincidences and parallels to her own life while acknowledging the extent of the inherited trauma. “I carry within me,” she concludes, “inscribed in the very cells of my body, the memory of an experience of danger so violent that sometimes I think I really lived it myself, or that I’ll be forced to relive it one day.” Readers of The Postcard will be left with similar feelings and much to ponder, especially after these words from Anne’s mother: “Indifference is universal. Who are you indifferent toward today, right now? Ask yourself that. Which victims living in tents, or under overpasses, or in camps way outside the cities are your ‘invisible ones’?”
Readers of The Postcard will be left with much to ponder, especially after these words: “Indifference is universal. Who are you indifferent toward today, right now?”
There are people who swear they can hear the voices of the departed. The dead want their stories told, demand justice for past doings or even offer encouragement to the listener. Lottie Rebecca Lee, the eventual protagonist of Zelda Lockhart’s powerful and hopeful novel Trinity, has heard all three. Three generations go by before Lottie incarnates, which partially explains the book’s title.
The story begins in 1939 in Sampson, Mississippi, where Black people live only a few steps up from slavery. Old Deddy, a 62-year-old Black sharecropper, enters into a contract to marry the 12-year-old daughter of his white boss in exchange for a parcel of land that the boss really has no intention of letting him own. That Old Deddy is a victim of such injustice doesn’t make him a saint; he beats his wife and sons as hard as he works. His son Bennie is gentler but still uses a switch on his own son just to let him know who’s in charge. Both Old Deddy’s and Bennie’s wives become pregnant with girls who would have housed Lottie Rebecca’s soul, but the pregnancies are lost. And so she is born as the daughter of Bennie’s son, traumatized Vietnam War veteran B.J. To break the cycle of familial violence, B.J. closes himself off from his wife and daughter even as he loves them.
Being the vehicle of the ancestors makes Lottie Rebecca a strange and uneasy child. Like Alia Atreides in Frank Herbert’s Dune, she seems to have been born with the knowledge of many lives that came before hers. Such knowledge is so oppressive that it causes screaming fits that Lottie’s family doesn’t understand. Yet she is buoyed by love, especially the love of her wise, gentle, Afrocentric mother, Sheila. When Lottie is a young woman, Sheila takes her on a pilgrimage to Ghana and the castle from which Africans were shipped off to be slaves in the Americas. It’s a place where the voices may ease up.
The author of Fifth Born, Fifth Born II: The Hundredth Turtle and Cold Running Creek, Lockhart explores how pain and injustice are passed down, and how that pain can ease and injustice can be reversed. Sometimes, though, it takes the whispers of the ancestors to make it happen.
Zelda Lockhart explores how pain and injustice are passed down and how they can be reversed. Sometimes it takes the whispers of the ancestors to make it happen.
Outside of the Regency, perhaps no other era in world history has a stronger pull in fiction than World War II. These are our favorite WWII-era novels so far in 2023.
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Outside of the Regency, perhaps no other era in world history has a stronger pull in fiction than World War II. These are our favorite WWII-era novels so far in 2023.
In Ana Menéndez’s fifth work of fiction, The Apartment, Miami is not just a luxurious playground for spring breakers but also a colorful tableau with an intricately wrought history.
The Helena is an apartment complex in South Miami Beach that has stood for over 70 years, bearing witness to changes in landscape, climate and population. On the second floor of the Helena, apartment 2B anchors our story as characters and circumstances flow by like currents. Sometimes these currents are calm and deep, but Menéndez focuses on the rougher ones, showing us Miami during World War II and immediately after 9/11. By the time readers meet the mysterious Lana in 2012, we already have a rich historical memory of 2B and the Helena, creating a unique intimacy that challenges the limitations of time and space.
The novel begins in 1942, when a woman named Sophie moves with her husband, Jack, to Miami for his military service. She soon finds that between the war and Jack’s increasingly abusive behavior, Miami is not the tropical paradise of her dreams. The next resident of 2B, Eugenio, a concert pianist and Cuban refugee in 1963, is trying to start his life over again. As he reflects on his career while playing piano at a nursing home, he comes to acknowledge the importance of generational memory.
A primary concern of the book is the capacity and limitations of marriage; in addition to Sophie’s story, we meet Marilyn, a disaffected wife in 1994 who grows bored and disgusted with her husband’s miserly ways. But the highlight of this thematic exploration, and of the book as a whole, are the relationships between Beatrice, Ignacio and Maribel in 2002. Beatrice is Ignacio’s girlfriend, but Maribel is his wife, a setup that is born out of the desperation of immigration. Maribel’s Cuban heritage grants her easier access to citizenship, which, through a fraudulent marriage, she tries to give to Ignacio, who is from Colombia. Beatrice, meanwhile, who is from Haiti, is caught between her love for Ignacio and his struggle for citizenship, raising questions about the restrictive self-labeling of nationality and marriage.
All of this occurs before we meet the final resident of 2B, Lana, who bears the weight of all of this history. Her residence is preceded by a man named Lenin (who also reveals himself as the book’s narrator), and as the mystery of Lenin begins to unfold, Lana’s own enigmatic past comes into sharp focus. Through this kaleidoscope of characters and relationships, apartment 2B, with its white mice and diminishing ocean views, proves the transcendent quality of both individual lives and Menéndez’s writing.
The Helena is an apartment complex in South Miami Beach that has stood for over 70 years, bearing witness to changes in landscape, climate and population. On the second floor of the Helena, apartment 2B anchors our story as characters and circumstances flow by like currents.
Tom Hanks’ first novel, The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece (16 hours), is an appropriately star-studded audiobook. Hanks narrates most of the story, with additional narration provided by actors Rita Wilson, Holland Taylor, Ego Nwodim, Nasim Pedrad and more.
The novel tells the story of the troubled present-day production of a new superhero film, going back to the 1970s comics that inspired the movie, and then further back to the World War II-era source material that led to the comics. As someone who’s worked on about a hundred movies (but ironically, no superhero films) as an actor, producer, writer and director, Hanks has insider knowledge of the film industry that makes him perfectly equipped to write about it in a cynical but loving way. His narration is ideally suited to the stylized dialogue; he sounds like a folksy dad pretending to be a noir detective.
As someone who’s worked on about a hundred movies as an actor, producer, writer and director, Tom Hanks has insider knowledge of the film industry that makes him perfectly equipped to write about it in a cynical but loving way.
Crook Manifesto, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Colson Whitehead’s elegant and pulse-pounding sequel to his tour-de-force heist novel, Harlem Shuffle, may exceed the original.
After 15 years as a Harlem businessman, Ray Carney, son of a career criminal, has become a pillar of the Black community. A property owner and merchant, he’s expanded his landmark furniture store on 125th Street, and his family lives in a brownstone he bought on the famed Strivers’ Row. His illicit side hustle as a fence seems firmly in the rear view.
And yet, four years after the close of the previous novel, Ray is both prosperous and twitchy. Temptation stalks him, and when his daughter, May, begs him for sold-out Jackson 5 tickets, he jumps at the opportunity to reach out to his less savory contacts, trading favors with a dirty cop for VIP seats and the chance to be a hero to the hard to impress teenager.
Still, though Ray frames this reentry to fencing as “the things you do for your kids,” it’s obvious that part of him misses the excitement of life off the straight and narrow. “Crooked stays crooked” is a silent mantra, and Ray is constantly tempted. When the best he can claim is that “sometimes whole hours passed where he didn’t have a crooked thought,” it seems so easy to do something he’s good at—just fence some stolen goods, and everyone’s a winner, right?
Whitehead’s acerbic, stylized and rhythmic storytelling voice is stronger than ever, but it’s his precise evocation of a fraying 1970s New York City that really makes Ray’s story compelling. Crook Manifesto replicates its precursor’s episodic, three-part structure and unsurpassed blending of social history and crime fiction, starting in 1971 and continuing to 1973 and 1976. The historical touchstones are fascinating and relatively less-storied compared to the ’60s signposts of Harlem Shuffle. The year 1971 includes the New York Police Department corruption scandal starring whistleblower detective Frank Serpico (played memorably by Al Pacino in the movie Serpico), the Black Liberation Army breaking off from the Black Panthers and that historic Jackson 5 concert. In 1973, it’s Blaxploitation film and counterculture, and in 1976, the U.S. bicentennial is the political spark that may finally burn it all down.
These pieces of history are inextricable from the spectacularly evocative atmosphere. Through Ray’s eyes, we’re immersed in a city in the midst of a slow-moving crisis. Crime is surging, trash is piling up, and the wealthy are fleeing to the suburbs and skyscraper fortresses. Even the wealthy Upper East Side is looking a bit shabby. The city’s story alone would be worth the price of admission, but the characters are equally strong, especially Ray, a study in contradictions. Between the muggers and police rousting Black men on the streets in higher numbers than usual, it seems a precarious time to be getting mixed up with a crooked cop who’s gone to seed. It’s even worse to be walking around Manhattan with a hundred thousand’s worth in stolen jewels; and yet as well as Ray is doing, and as much as he has to lose, he quite convincingly can’t resist the siren call of danger.
With that knockout interplay between context and character, Crook Manifesto more than matches the finely hewn psychological tensions that haunted its (anti) hero in Harlem Shuffle. The combination makes this sequel soar.
Photo of Colson Whitehead by Chris Close.
Crook Manifesto more than matches the finely hewn psychological tensions that haunted Colson Whitehead’s main character in Harlem Shuffle. The interplay between context and character makes this sequel soar.
Pip Williams strikes again after her bestselling debut, The Dictionary of Lost Words, with a touching follow-up about twin sisters in their early 20s, navigating life as bookbinders in Oxford, England, in the early 1900s. The Bookbinder is a rich account of class relations during a tumultuous era in history that also displays deep love and appreciation for literature and its wardens.
Peggy and Maude Jones fold books at Clarendon Press. As she binds the pages, Peggy sneaks illicit glances at the words, but this is pitiful consolation for an avid reader who dreams of studying English literature at Somerville College, one of Oxford’s women’s colleges, which is directly across the street. But Peggy and Maude, who live together in a docked boat, are not wealthy enough to pay for tutors or forgo their incomes for schooling.
Peggy feels responsible for Maude, who primarily communicates by repeating other people’s words. As Peggy describes, “Maude filtered conversation like a prism filters light. . . . My sister had a simplicity that unnerved people, an honesty that made them uncomfortable. It suited most to think that her words were nothing more than sounds bouncing off the walls of an empty room. It suited them to think she was feeble-minded.” (In the novel’s acknowledgments, Williams mentions autism and echolalia, the term for Maude’s repetitive form of speech.)
When the Great War hits Belgium, refugees arrive in Oxford, and the corners of the town’s social hierarchy begin to fold in on themselves. Peggy starts volunteering at the local military hospital, where she meets both Bastiaan, a wounded Belgian officer, and Grace, a spunky and empathetic Somerville student who serves as Peggy’s volunteer partner. Joined by the Jones sisters’ neighbors, colleagues, librarians and friends, Bastiaan and Grace help to form a makeshift family for Peggy and become her uplifting, memorable cheerleaders.
Williams imbues Peggy with admirable authenticity, and her struggles are achingly real. Deciding how much to risk—how hard to push herself out of her comfort zone—is a constant battle, but it is the path toward growth. Williams’ commitment to optimism and courage is unmistakable, making The Bookbinder immensely heartwarming despite its weighty content. She proves yet again that while luck can only take you so far, determination will pave the rest of the way.
Pip Williams’ commitment to optimism and courage is unmistakable, making The Bookbinder immensely heartwarming despite its weighty content.
In 1972, digging commences on a new development in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, and unearths the desiccated skeletal remains of an unidentified man. This shocking discovery kicks off National Book Award winner James McBride’s riveting sixth novel, but while the man’s identity and how he ended up dead in a farmer’s well are essential mysteries, they aren’t the heart of this gorgeous historical tale. That belongs to the lifesaving relationships between the novel’s diverse groups of people.
Following his acclaimed, blockbuster crime novel, Deacon King Kong, McBride takes a softer turn while expanding beautifully on the themes of race, religion and belonging from his groundbreaking memoir, The Color of Water. Alongside the decadeslong mystery of the man’s remains, there are all kinds of love in The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, from love for a child to the platonic love of friends, co-workers and neighbors. There’s also a beautifully rendered romantic love story between two of the leads.
In 1930s Pottstown, the multiracial and pluralistic working-class neighborhood of Chicken Hill is witness to care and cooperation as well as conflict among its disparate inhabitants, leading to both redemption and the kind of danger that leaves an anonymous corpse more than six feet under. Chicken Hill is “a tiny area of ramshackle houses and dirt roads where the town’s blacks, Jews, and immigrant whites who couldn’t afford any better lived.” Moshe Ludlow, a Jewish immigrant from Romania who “could talk the horns off the devil’s head,” manages a theater. When he meets Chona Flohr, the brilliant daughter of the local rabbi (who also owns the titular grocery store), he knows that she is the gift that will transform his life for the better.
While Moshe is struck by Chona’s beauty, it’s her fierce intelligence, fearlessness and “eyes that [shine] with gaiety and mirth” that capture his heart. Despite restrictions on women’s religious participation, Chona is a self-taught biblical scholar. Her body bears the lasting effects of polio; with one leg shorter than the other, she limps and wears a boot with a sole four inches thick. After they marry, with Chona’s help, Moshe becomes a wildly successful theater owner who defies tradition to host Jewish and Black performers together on the stage, attracting crowds from miles around: “The reform snobs from Philadelphia were there in button-down shirts, standing next to ironworkers from Pittsburgh, who crowded against socialist railroad men from Reading wearing caps bearing the Pennsylvania Railroad logo, who stood shoulder to shoulder with coal miners with darkened faces from Uniontown and Spring City.”
Chona also continues to run the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, and when so many other Jewish families are finding a way out of Chicken Hill, Chona and Moshe dig in. This inclusive, expansive and defiant love leads Moshe and Chona to embrace an orphaned Black boy, their friends’ ward, who’s targeted by a predatory local Klan leader who’s also the leading doctor in the neighborhood. These actions set off a series of unfortunate and heartbreaking events.
McBride is a lyricist and musician, and there’s a rhythmic quality to this unique novel, which began as an ode to a beloved figure in McBride’s life: Sy Friend, the director of a camp for disabled children where the author worked for four years in his youth. These origins are visible in the novel’s nuanced portrayals of disability and race, and in the heroic figure of Chona and the myriad other fantastically imperfect humans who populate the polyglot neighborhood of immigrants, Jews and Black people in this heart-rending and hopeful tale of cross-cultural solidarity, love and redemption.
James McBride is a lyricist and musician, and there's a rhythmic quality to his unique sixth novel, which began as an ode to a beloved figure in the author’s life.
There is no institution in the United States more powerful, more mysterious, more impenetrable than the Supreme Court. It’s rare when we get to see the nine sitting justices as mere mortals—whether in moments of horror and disappointment, such as the sexual misconduct case against Brett Kavanaugh, or in moments of levity, as when Ruth Bader Ginsburg dozed off during the 2015 State of the Union.
In Elizabeth L. Silver’s engrossing and thought-provoking novel The Majority, we meet Justice Sylvia Olin Bernstein, aka “the Contemptuous S.O.B.” A flinty and aging justice, she decides it’s time to tell her life story—messy relationships, heartbreak and all. While The Majority is a clear homage to Ginsburg, Silver (The Execution of Noa P. Singleton) paints a full portrait of Sylvia, whose life unfolds during some of the most consequential events in American history.
Sylvia’s mother dies when she is young, leaving her in a loving but bleak home in New York with her devout Jewish father and a cousin who fled the Nazis after her entire family was killed. Sylvia gets her chance to move on when she’s one of only nine women admitted in 1959 to Harvard Law School. With her vast intelligence and force of will, Sylvia ascends to the highest levels of the United States legal system.
As is so often the case for trailblazers, her success comes with significant sacrifice, both personally and professionally. When she takes on a landmark case involving a woman who lost her job when she became pregnant, Sylvia realizes she has been preparing for this case for most of her life. “My mother told me when I was twelve years old that we—women—were close to being the larger group in America,” she tells the plaintiff. “Well, now women are the majority, and yet we hold almost no power at all. In some small way, perhaps this is a slight chiseling away at that. And if successful, it’s a legacy you can pass on to more than [your child]. It’s a legacy to pass on to an entire country.”
The Majority is more than an entertaining read, although it is certainly that. It’s a profound contemplation of how women are treated by the law and how they administer the law. The Contemptuous S.O.B. is both a brilliant jurist and an all-too-human woman fighting against a system stacked against her.
While The Majority is a clear homage to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elizabeth L. Silver paints a full portrait of Sylvia, whose life unfolds during some of the most consequential events in American history.
The Ray Carney saga is Colson Whitehead’s first series, and just like his readers, he feels passionately about the man at its center: a respectable, upwardly mobile furniture salesman by day, and fence of stolen goods by night. “I love him too. He’s been a great source of pleasure and inspiration,” says the author. But that affection doesn’t stop Whitehead from mercilessly putting Ray through the wringer.
Picking up four years after the close of Harlem Shuffle, Crook Manifesto heightens the dangers and stakes for the prosperous Harlem merchant and former hustler, and Ray soon gets sucked back into life on the seamier side. After all, as Whitehead writes, “crooked stays crooked and bent hates straight.”
In truth, the author may love Ray now, but the character was born out of a kind of hate—the distaste Whitehead felt for a ubiquitous trope in heist movies. “The character of the fence is always a travesty,” he says. “The team does all the work, and half the crew’s dead—they’re crawling or bloody, the cops are after them. And then some random guy you haven’t even seen before in the whole movie is like ‘10 cents on the dollar.’”
“I hated the fence so much that I started thinking, who is that? Who is that guy?”
Whitehead was incensed by the patterns he observed on-screen, but that ire gave way to curiosity: “I hated the fence so much that I started thinking, who is that? Who is that guy?” And from this interrogation came the driving force of the Ray Carney trilogy: “the psychology of the fence. . . . Having a front business and having your illegal stuff in the back provided the divided nature of Ray Carney.”
Although Whitehead kept his cards close to the vest, he knew almost from the start that he had a series on his hands. While the initial instinct was “to do a heist book and just have fun with that genre,” once started, the ideas kept flowing. There was just too much material, and he was having too much fun to stop at one book. “I was halfway through [Harlem Shuffle], and I was coming up with more capers that obviously would not fit,” he says.
Doing the math, he figured: six adventures, two books. But also, “if you do two, might as well do three. You know, I’m definitely a rule-of-three guy.” Still, he proceeded cautiously in terms of commitment. He didn’t want to be held to a third book, just in case he got bored—but that never happened. Now he’s deep in the writing of Ray’s third and presumably final set of adventures.
Along with the series being a trilogy, each individual book has a three-act structure. Harlem Shuffle tells of three separate misadventures for Ray at three pivotal moments during the 1960s, and this structure continues in Crook Manifesto, which evokes the ’70s down to the sight, feel and smell of a crumbling New York City. In the first book, Ray is in his 30s; second book, 40s; third book, 50s. Ray’s experiences with aging and all its attendant challenges are essential to the series, and it also means that initially, “his kids are babies; in the second book, they’re teenagers of varying degrees of annoyingness; and in the third book, they’ll be in college and out of the house.”
Three decades is, as Whitehead says, “a long stretch of time.” But in addition to the capers and misadventures that flow from the heist narrative, he found something compelling about the mystery surrounding the fence, and with great finesse he explores the dichotomy between Ray’s straight-and-narrow life and “the call of the street.” We witness Ray’s wrestling with his criminal nature—“bending toward it, embracing it, rejecting it,” Whitehead says—and by shifting our focus to this internal tug of war, we are invited to think beyond the usual markers of time and success.
In the four-year interregnum between Harlem Shuffle and Crook Manifesto, Ray has kept his nose clean, built a prosperous business and bought both a commercial building for his store and a home for his family, moving uptown to the much storied if fraying Strivers’ Row. It’s a laudable, remarkable rise for the son of a failed career criminal, and yet it’s not enough.
In 1971, the year Crook Manifesto kicks off, Ray’s sabbatical from crime ends abruptly in an almost ironic way, considering the innocence of the inciting incident in comparison to the refuse he must wade through after. Ray calls on an old contact to get tickets to a sold-out (and history-making) Jackson 5 concert for his 15-year-old daughter—although as Whitehead points out, this fatherly duty is a cover to give in to an itch that’s been nagging at him for years.
The world around Ray is also evolving. In Harlem Shuffle, Whitehead allowed the pull of crucial—though not necessarily widely remembered—events in New York City history to guide him in shaping Ray’s story. In pursuit of key moments to “exploit,” he arrived upon the anti-police Harlem riots in 1943 and 1964. Whitehead decided that Invisible Man had portrayed the former in such an iconic, indelible manner that “I’ll let Ralph [Ellison] keep the 1940s one. I haven’t read a lot of stuff about the 1960s one. So it was open territory.”
The tension between the public and the police escalates to a palpable and deadly fever pitch in Crook Manifesto. The New York Police Department wages war against Black power activists, and a police corruption scandal widens, putting cops in the hot seat. And yet, in a way that matches the dualism of the novel’s leading man, Ray’s story also shows how normal life goes on alongside such events.
In keeping with that, the movie- and music-obsessed author takes the opportunity to throw his love of pop culture history into the mix, something that gives him great pleasure. “I was very taken with that idea that I could get my pop culture fixation and bring Ray along,” he says. So in addition to the Jackson 5 concert, which provides a soundtrack and momentum for Crook Manifesto’s first movement, the second section weaves in the rise of Blaxploitation cinema. It’s a heady and riveting mashup of politics, culture, family life and crime that only a talent of Whitehead’s stature could so seamlessly blend.
Photo of Colson Whitehead by Chris Close.
As the Ray Carney series steps into the 1970s, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Colson Whitehead continues to explore history through propulsive heist narratives that go far beyond crimes and cover-ups.
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