Cool Machine by Colson Whitehead review – final part of the Harlem Trilogy is freewheeling fun
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- Cool Machine by Colson Whitehead is the third and final book of the Harlem Trilogy, covering New York City between 1981 and 1986 with hip-hop, graffiti and a widening rich-poor gulf as backdrop.
- Ray Carney, the trilogy's hardscrabble protagonist, runs a furniture store on 125th Street while moonlighting as an underworld fence, a dual life the reviewer likens to Spider-Man.
- The novel plays out across three interlinked tales, including a squabble over a Jesse Owens Olympic medal and a Ngil mask from Gabon that ignites the East Village art scene.
- Carney discovers a Morlock-style tent city in the Manhattan train tunnels governed by a self-styled 'Mayor Crotch,' described as casualties of the prosperity above.
- Carney's director friend Zippo is making a redubbed version of Hitchcock's 1963 'The Birds' in which the N-word replaces every mention of birds, taking what Zippo calls the film's racial subtext and 'making it text.'
- Whitehead originally framed the trilogy as a jaunty break from his Pulitzer-winning 'Underground Railroad' and 'Nickel Boys,' though the reviewer finds darker currents of class and racial tension running beneath the freewheeling fun.
- By the novel's end, Carney is in his 50s with one eye on the exit, grappling with a New York the reviewer compares to an 'ageless and elemental' Mississippi River — indifferent to whether he lives or dies.
Why it matters: The trilogy's conclusion gives Whitehead a vehicle to map four decades of New York's black-and-white social churn — from 1960s civil rights through 1970s 'Fear City' to the 1980s art-and-grime boom — through one recurring fence, capping a commercially successful detour from his heavier Pulitzer-winning work.
