Colin Whitehead, two-time Pulitzer winner and #1 New York times bestselling author’s Cool Machine is an entertaining novel that brings to life 1980s New York in his Harlen Trilogy.  1918 New York City is beginning to emerge from financial ruin and decline, energized by rampant real estate development and a Wall Street unchained by Regan-era predatory capitalism. Up in Harlem, however, successful business owner/master fence  for stolen goods which keeps dragging Ray Carney violently into the criminal underworld which requires delicate balancing act, but this concept of “constant turbulent change”, has kept him moving. Just as Carney moves between different worlds, Whitehead is both a celebrated literary author and one who thrives in popular genres.   

His 1999 debut, The Intuitionist, is a noirish work of speculative fiction: 2011’s Zone One is a post-apocalyptic zombie novel, and the Harlem trilogy is unabashed crime fiction. Whitehead is only the fourth writer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction twice, for 2016’s The Underground Railroad, a counterfactual slave narrative that also won the National Book Award and for 2019’s The Nickel Boys, the fictionalised story of the Dozier School for Boys, where unspeakable abuses of students occurred in 1960s Florida.

Cool Machine is not about a moral awakening as regards his criminal activities. The crook that populate Whitehead’s Harlem are, if not valorised, generally more principle than its straight world operators- particularly the politicians and police.

Ray Carney has just been named Sterling Furniture’s Dealer of the Month. When the banks won’t give his beloved wife Elizabeth a loan for her new travel agency. Carney gambles on one last heist and finds himself entangled with a legendary criminal mastermind.

 In Cool Machine’s first story centred around the Waldorf heist- his crew goes underground via a disused railway line to find a vast homeless encampment. Intuitively, he identifies these people as “casualties of the prosperity above,” and dismisses meritocratic judgement: “If his luck had gone another way, who knows how he would’ve ended up.”  

 1983, to some, Carney’s friend and partner in crime, Pepper, is a stone-cold sociopath. To other, a top thief with questionable people skills. Either way, he’s feeling his age in his troubled gut and his aching bones. When he takes on a bodyguard gig as a favour to Elizabeth, he’s plunged into the alien territory of the East Village art and club scene. Luckily for him, whether you’re uptown or down everyone sneaks the same language of violence.-Pepper is a native speaker.

1986, Carney has always been haunted by his inability to save his cousin Freddie. Now, twenty years after Freddie’s death, he has a chance to rescue Freddie’s son from the violent forces of the city.  In the novels final section, in which he once again enters the criminal world he comes to realise that resilience and rugged individualism are not qualities everyone should or needs to aspire to.

But coming out of retirement and teaming up with Pepper again will mean risking the safety and security he’s spent decades building for his family, with only one shot With his usual fever-pitch perfect prose, Whitehead paints a portrait of a city in transition, where shimmering skyscrapers rise to the heavens as displaced people huddle in abandoned tunnels below, in a dazzling display of protean imagination, Cool Machine roves all over the city, from Windows on the World to the Meadowlands, to show that in New York, and in the lives of Whitehead’s vivid characters. It’s what’s below the surface that reveals the truth.

Cool Machine by Colson Whitehead, Fleet £22/Doubleday $30, 368 pages.