Colson Whitehead’s latest novel is proof that good things come in threes. The acclaimed writer may not have followed up his two Pulitzer Prize-winning books The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys with another weighty offering of fact-based fiction about racial persecution, but he has, instead, now added a third and final volume to his series of New York-set crime capers starring Ray Carney—a respectable furniture salesman and part-time fence. The first installment, Harlem Shuffle (2021), charted Carney’s life and crimes against the backdrop of civil rights struggles in the 1960s. The second book, Crook Manifesto (2023), continued his misadventures on meaner streets in the 1970s amid Black Liberation Army conflict and police corruption. Whitehead concludes his Harlem Trilogy with Cool Machine, this time plunging Carney into the so-called decade of greed. We find him older but not necessarily wiser. Has he got what it takes to endure a fresh onslaught of personal challenges and social upheavals?
As with the previous two volumes, Whitehead’s book comprises three interlinked novellas. The first one, “The City at Night,” unfolds in 1981 and opens with Carney being stunned to learn that Sterling Furniture has selected him as Northeast Regional Dealer of the Month. He gets a nastier surprise, however, when he turns his attention to his “other business.” Summoned to the office of Martin Green to see some “new samples”—code for hearing out and weighing up a possible operation—Carney finds his friend gagged, handcuffed, and bloodied, and two men standing next to him with guns. “We’re looking for Uncle Rich,” one of them says. When the name doesn’t register with Carney, the man swiftly jogs his memory by holding aloft a glistening sapphire.
Having snared his reader, Whitehead rewinds some weeks to a deal Carney made for a Cartier diamond necklace with a small-fry thief and a bigger fish named Dwayne. The necklace was genuine but Carney now realizes the name was fake: Dwayne was none other than Harlem legend and criminal mastermind Uncle Rich, a man “half crook, half crooked fantasy,” whose illustrious and audacious scams and raids are “enshrined in the larcenous pantheon.” After faking his death, Uncle Rich is now back on the scene. Those two trigger-happy goons were double-crossed by him and are out for vengeance. But Uncle Rich has more important matters on his mind. He wants Carney to join his crew and help them pull off the ultimate heist at the Waldorf-Astoria. Carney signs up after the banks refuse to grant his wife, Elizabeth, a loan for her travel agency. Can they defy the odds and come out on top?
Whitehead’s second story takes place two years later and relegates Carney to a cameo. Here the protagonist is Pepper, Carney’s long-term partner in crime and one of Whitehead’s recurring characters. In the previous two books, Pepper flexed his muscle and caused mayhem. In this outing we see him as a shadow of his former self. Used to conducting “a vast inventory of pain,” and, in turn, experiencing his fair share of beatings, the violence Pepper now contends with consists of aches in his joints and fits of agonizing stomach cramps.
Pepper soldiers on and accepts a job as a bodyguard to Elizabeth’s biggest client. But when a deal goes awry, Pepper finds himself joining forces with a no-nonsense young woman called LJ and on the trail of stolen money and a missing African mask. As the pair trawl East Village streets and nightclubs, Whitehead raises the stakes and thickens his plot by letting loose a particularly sadistic contract killer tasked with hunting down the African artifact and anyone who gets in his way. We read on, willing Pepper to complete his novel assignment—one of restitution, not retribution—while wondering what poses the greater threat to his life, his quarry or his health.
The last act, which plays out in 1986, looks set to be a low-key affair, with Carney now going straight and spending more quality time with Elizabeth. But when both the police and the mob show an interest in locating his AWOL nephew, Carney puts his life on the line to safeguard a wanted man and, along the way, atone for a mistake that has haunted him for years.
Cool Machine could have been the weak link in the Harlem Trilogy, the turning point where Whitehead runs out of steam, or ideas, and makes do by serving up recycled tropes and repurposed scenarios. Happily, it is a triumph, both a captivating standalone novel and a glorious end to a compelling saga. Whitehead’s winning components are as fresh as before. We encounter a colorful cast of robbers and schemers, conmen and hitmen, gangsters and hustlers. The plotting is tight and often twisty. The prose has verve and swagger, punch and panache: One heavy resembles a plumber, the kind “who comes back when you aren’t home to strangle your parakeet if you stiff him on the bill.” There is violence—people get shot, mutilated, and “smithereened”—but also more than enough wit to offset the grit.
As ever, Whitehead sprinkles passages with shrewd commentaries or observations about class divides, social unrest, and, above all, racial injustice. Asked by an interviewer to give an example of a moment when he was tested, Carney scoffs to himself: “He was a black man in America. When was he not being tested?” Pepper wanders the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria and notices “they had both kinds of white people—the ones who flinch when they see you and the ones who look right through you.”
Whitehead ensures we are invested in the exploits of his two antiheroes. He fleshes out Carney by having him muse on the intoxicating chaos that keeps him in the crime game, along with the relentless “churn” that powers the metropolis, circulates stolen goods, and propels him forward. Whitehead elevates Pepper from a mere thuggish caricature by showing him adrift in, and unable to keep pace with, an ever-changing city.
That city looms large on the page throughout this book and its predecessors. On this occasion, Whitehead depicts it as “a monstrous entity powered by innate miseries, operated by brute will, and held together by pluck, fury, and rebar.” Hippies give way to yuppies, graffiti adorns subways, rap—”a crooked art”—is born, and certain lives are wrecked by both urban decay and regeneration. “It was an expensive city,” Whitehead writes, “but cutting dreams and ambitions down to size was on the house.”
In The Underground Railroad, the fugitive slave, Cora, was in search of freedom—”the greatest currency of all.” At the end of Cool Machine, we learn through Carney of another superlative, “the biggest con of all.” He is referring not to a grand rip-off operation but rather the erroneous belief that “there were other places besides New York City.” The Big Apple is rotten to the core in this novel, yet it is Carney’s world. As he navigates its darker corners and negotiates its tumultuous changes, we follow him, and root for him, every step of the way.
Cool Machine: A Novel
by Colson Whitehead
Doubleday, 368 pp., $30
Malcolm Forbes is a writer whose work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, and other publications.
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