Cool Machine by Colson Whitehead

Reviewed by Harriet

He wasn’t a fence today. He was a thief among his kind.

Anyone who’s read Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle and/or his Crook Manifesto will welcome Cool Machine, the third volume in Whitehead’s trilogy starring Ray Carney. Educated and intelligent, happily married, and a successful furniture salesman in Harlem, Carney is the son of a criminal whose body was found in the boot of a car. And in fact, the large sum of money found with his father’s body has enabled him to set up his showroom. Carney could be said to have a foot in both camps, and lives a double life as a fence for stolen goods, unknown to Elizabeth, his lovely, successful businesswoman wife and his two children, who are now, in the third volume, away at university.

Carney has never been able to resist the temptation to ‘dabble’, but what he gets up to in this book – set in the 1980s – finds him unwillingly participating in a rather more serious crime. Elizabeth is away at a conference, the kids are elsewhere, and when he encounters an ancient criminal mastermind known as Uncle Rich – long believed to be dead – he gets drawn into a complicated and dangerous heist. Rich’s surprisingly moral purpose is to prevent a gold medal won in 1936 by the black athlete Jesse Owens from being sold to a rich white man, which he sees as an act of what today would be called cultural appropriation. Seeking a secret entrance into the Waldorf Astoria hotel, Carney encounters an underground tent city inhabited by a large number of homeless people, which he realises are the casualties of the prosperous life lived above their heads: ‘The richer those up top got, the more miserable and numerous those below became’. In the course of the action Carney gets slugged, has a gun shoved against his face, but also has time for discussions about French art films with Uncle Rich (“Did you ever see Aphaville?”). This moment comes at the end of his adventure, and he leaves wondering if he will end up with the destitute and homeless. 

This is only the first part of this three part novel. The protagonist of the second is Carney’s old friend Pepper. Pepper is old and unwell with a serious though undiagnosed stomach complaint, and is passing his time learning new words – ‘bumptious’ sticks with him because he can apply it to people he knew (‘bumptious crooks were like cockroaches – for every one you see, there are a dozen more’) and ‘dilapidated’ rings a bell because he himself is dilapidated now. Pepper gets involved in an attempt to recover a looted African mask from its rich white owner – more cultural appropriation – and finds himself rather surprised to be working with a young woman art dealer. He encounters a vicious killer known as the Melancholy Hitman, famous for once cutting off the face of an opponent, but manages to emerge victorious from what could have been a fatal episode.

Carney reappears in the third part, this time rather unwillingly trying to fulfil a promise he had made decades ago to a criminal cousin whose life he failed to save – the cousin’s son is in deep trouble, being pursued by both the Mafia and the police. Another hitman, Rabbit, is on Carney’s tracks, and his family is in danger, but he manages once more to emerge unscathed. 

The novel ends with Carney, now fifty-five, contemplating the possibility of retirement. “We could travel”, says Elizabeth. But Carney realises that everywhere else will be much the same, with the same ‘Noise, dirt and struggle’:

Escape from New York. The question remained: where do you go? There was no place else. It was like going on the lam from yourself. He’d been suckered before …But he’d never fallen for that long con, the biggest con of all, that there were other places in the world besides New York City. 

Like all Whitehead’s novels this one is a great pleasure to read, both for his superb prose and for the combination of wit with serious issues and an impressively convincing historical background. Highly recommended.

Harriet is a co-founder and one of the editors of Shiny.

Colson Whitehead, Cool Machine (Fleet, 2026). 978-0349727677, 368pp., hardback.

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