Colson Whitehead on “Crook Manifesto”

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 25 July 2023

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Colson Whitehead is one of the most lauded writers working today. His 2016 novel “The Underground Railroad” won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction; he won the Pulitzer again for his next novel, “The Nickel Boys,” in 2020. His career is notable for hopping from genre to genre. As an artist, he tells David Remnick, “it seemed like, if you knew how to do something, why do it again?” Whitehead is again trying something new: a sequel. He’s following up “Harlem Shuffle,” his 2021 heist novel, bringing back the furniture salesman and stolen-goods fence Ray Carney. He talks to David Remnick about how he mined the language of mid-century furniture catalogues, and his interest in teasing out the nuance in his characters. “I’m exploring different ways of being a criminal and trying to think about who actually is bad,” Whitehead says. “Carney has this secret self, this criminal self. But I think all of us have these different uncivilized impulses in us that we have to tame in order to function in society.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:10.3	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remney.
0:14.0	Colson Whitehead's creation, the Harlem Fence and Furniture Salesman Ray Carney,
0:19.1	is one of the great crooks in modern fiction. Ray isn't
0:23.1	big time. He's not a kingpin. He's not even a particularly bad guy. He sells barca loungers and
0:30.1	out the back door he fences stolen goods. He's a guy looking to pay his bills and get by.
0:37.8	Ray was the hero of Whitehead's Harlem Shuffle, and he returns now in a sequel, the hilarious sequel, Crook Manifesto.
0:46.2	In Crook Manifesto, Carney has retreated for a while, but then he gets drawn back into crime as a way to come through for his daughter.
0:55.9	She's dying to get tickets to see the Jackson Five who are playing a sold-out show at Madison Square Garden.
1:04.5	Colson Whitehead won Pulitzer Prizes for his novels The Underground Railroad and the Nickel Boys.
1:13.1	This book, Crook Manifesto, is the very first time that he's written a sequel.
1:18.8	How did you envision it in the beginning?
1:20.9	You started with some journalism, and awfully good journalism too.
1:28.1	Was it difficult to make that leap into imaginative literature, into writing fiction?
1:33.4	I always wanted to write fiction, so I love the village voice growing up, and it was my dream job to start off there.
1:40.6	I worked in the book section.
1:42.5	It was my job to open the 40 books a day we got from
1:45.4	bookseller, from publishers. At that point, if you were in the building, you could get work.
1:51.0	And so I hit up the TV editor for my first piece, my big break. And now TV criticism is very
1:58.1	accepted, and it's a real part of the, of the arts section.
2:03.1	But back then it was like the saddest, like, why are you writing about TV?
2:05.8	It was really embarrassing.
	...

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