Cover design by Oliver Munday
In Cool Machine, super-cool, two-time Pulitzer prize-winning novelist Colson Whitehead gets off not only a fine conclusion to his Harlem Trilogy but some of the most impressive writing he’s done --dazzling imagery, sardonic asides and street rhythms that capture the tone and turmoil of the years covered - 1981, 1983 and 1986. The earlier crime romps -- Harlem Shuffle, about New York in the ‘60 and Crook Manifesto, about New York in the’70s now yield to the most ironic, hilarious and reflective narrative of the three. The dedication nails the attitude: Cool Machine is “For New York [bleepin’] City.” Violent, Engaging, Unique.
The epigraphs to all three of its sections reinforce the novel’s instructive cynicism. For 1981 “It’s harder to find a good coffee table than it is to fall in love.” For 1983: “It should be understood that over the course of his [criminal] career [Pepper] had conducted a vast inventory of pain.” And for 1986: “It was getting dark later, so the city was ugly longer.” Politics and fads are invoked in authentic detail, with pervasive corruption the common thread. Whitehead is 56-years-old, his research impressive. Though he sees the city and its inhabitants through a black perspective, hustlers white and black bop around uptown and down.
At the center of all the “churm” as Whitehead refers to the vibe of the city, is likable Ray Carney, owner of a now successful furniture store on 125th Street –“nice furniture for nice folks.” He grew up and lives in Harlem, “which is its own school,” he muses, where you learn one skill early on: ‘When the shooting starts: Duck.” The son of an infamous but admired professional crook, now dead, Ray’s sustained hard times, but he’s cunning and persevering– like a muskrat, a relative says - he loves his family and grown children, now away. His beloved upper-class wife Elizabeth is kind of aware of what he does on the side but lets him breathe. He admits he loves the “chaos,” “the romance of the heist,” and his old pals know it and rope him in – one last time? He’s a “cool machine,” it’s said. He values the take but as much the M.O. of the operation. Cool Machine also features Ray’s cronies and relatives from the earlier books, now older and not well, but who still sizzle on the sidelines for action, particularly Pepper, a savvy old crook and killer who lives on Pepto-Bismol, and Uncle Rich, a smart idea man who wants to rob the Waldorf Astoria and reclaim Jesse Owens’ Olympic medal.” The imagery is apt: Ray “missed the 4 train. It slipped into the tunnel when he reached the platform, like a pickpocket’s hand into a purse.”
Everyone is on the make or take, though there are degrees of acceptability – Mafia hitmen who cut up faces, City Hall biggies who muscle for kickbacks are bad. The book gains breadth by moving downtown as well as focusing on Harlem, as Whitehead follows lost hippies, addicts, punks, nonconformists, phonies and madmen, mostly black, in the East Village. Graffiti is everywhere: “ I’ll love you forever / I’ll love you until the scaffolding comes down.”
One of the more memorable scenes in the book is of a community of homeless living in the railroad tunnels under Penn Station. The more surreal, the more believable. Racism is a given. As Uncle Rich reminds Ray, “a lot of white folks won’t work with blacks: Their racist fantasies prevent them from joining Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream of little black boys and little white boys joining hands to take down a poorly secured warehouse or insufficiently defended corner bank.”
Cool Machine gives the term “crime novel” new meaning, the hypocrisy of so-called so called “justice,” something he’s never met, “ says Ray. Still, looking back on the `80s Whitehead seems to suggest that if striving and fantasy have any chance of realization for the black underclass, there’s no place on earth more likely to grant the opportunity than New York. The city tests us, forces us to be self aware, to survive. “Give me noise, dirt, and struggle and I’ll be all right,” Ray says, ending the book. Though readers may wonder what Whitehead thinks today.
