Real Life Rock Top 10: July 10, 2023

1. Colson Whitehead, Crook Manifesto (Doubleday).  The second in Whitehead’s series of Harlem crime novels revolving around the pilgrim’s progress of furniture salesman and fence Ray Carney, this is leagues stronger than the 2021 Harlem Shuffle.  For that matter, it’s better than the 2019 Nickel Boys, which won Whitehead’s second Pulitzer Prize.  Breath to breath—in terms of nervousness, stakes rising, a suspense that builds somewhere beyond the characters and the reader’s ken—there may be more churning beneath the surface of this book than in The Underground Railroad, which won Whitehead’s first Pulitzer, and which as a magic realist masterpiece fulfilled the magic-realist-masterpiece genre as much as it told its own story.  What Whitehead is doing now is closer to the way he seemed less to create—though he created like a Houdini— than to inhabit both character and setting in The Intuitionist (1999), John Henry Days (200l), and Apex Hides the Hurt (2006).  And to take it outside Whitehead’s own territory, this may be better than anything Walter Mosley has written since the 2004 Easy Rawlins mystery Little Scarlet.