Cool Machine
A Novel
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4.6 • 36 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From #1 New York Times bestselling author and two-time Pulitzer winner Colson Whitehead, an exuberantly entertaining novel that brings to life 1980s New York in the magnificent final volume of his Harlem Trilogy
1981. New York City is beginning to emerge from financial ruin and decline, energized by rampant real estate development and a Wall Street unchained by Reagan-era predatory capitalism. Up in Harlem, successful business owner/master fence 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, however, Carney gambles on one last heist, and finds himself entangled with a legendary criminal mastermind.
1983. To some, Carney’s friend and partner in crime, Pepper, is a stone-cold sociopath. To others, 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 favor 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 speaks 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. 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 to get it right.
With his usual 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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Ray Carney has spent three decades trying to balance two lives: respectable Harlem furniture dealer and part-time criminal. In the final installment of Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Trilogy, that balancing act becomes harder than ever. At three points across 1980s New York, Carney and his loyal enforcer Pepper navigate heists and the consequences of their chosen lives. As always, Whitehead delivers all the pleasures of a classic crime novel: witty dialogue, memorable side characters, and expertly engineered suspense. But what stayed with us most was his portrait of a city in transition. Through Carney’s eyes, we see New York emerge from the crises of the 1970s into a decade of profit-driven speculation and widening inequality. His city is changing, and so are the people who have spent their lives trying to survive in it. Funny, insightful, and deeply rooted in its time and place, Cool Machine brings Whitehead’s exhilarating series to a richly rewarding conclusion.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Whitehead concludes his Harlem Trilogy (after Crook Manifesto) with a transcendent and wildly entertaining novel in which his recurring characters grapple with the ways their lives are defined by crime and the city they call home. In 1981, furniture dealer and semiretired fence Ray Carney, now an empty nester, helps move a hot sapphire necklace, telling himself he's taking the risk for his wife, a travel agent trying to put out her own shingle. Soon, though, he gets in deeper than he'd bargained for, joining a crew for an ambitious heist at the Waldorf Astoria hotel. He compares his evolution as a criminal to the "churn" of the ever-changing metropolis, where transplants to the city outnumber those who left for the suburbs. Two years later, Carney's old friend and associate Pepper faces a reckoning of his own. Getting on in years and stumbling after a botched job, Pepper commits to recovering a precious African mask from an unscrupulous downtown art dealer despite feeling left behind by the city, where "maybe the game had changed, too." The saga concludes in 1986, when Carney weighs how much to help a nephew in danger. The heists, stakeouts, and showdowns are rendered with grit and precision, but the real wallops come in breathtaking riffs on the city's magnetic force, for instance when Carney, remembering the 1981 film Escape from New York, recognizes that leaving town would be like "going on the lam from yourself." It's the greatest New York novel in years.
Customer Reviews
Brilliant
A wonderful end to a delightful trilogy.
Did anyone edit this book???
Colson Whitehead is one of my favorite authors but yikes! This is three stories in one. All the way through he spends way too much time on NYC descriptions. There’s so much clutter that I had a hard time keeping the thread of the plot. I realize that he’s tying in the past two books but this is ridiculous!