After any chapter of Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Trilogy, I feel as though I am reading a particularly operatic story by Damon Runyon, complete with molls, dolls and Broadway-laden side-eyes. It is the kind of widescreen social drama that immediately reads like a screenplay. With pitch-perfect colloquialisms and deadpan humour, these books tell the story of Ray Carney, a furniture salesman striving to provide a stable, respectable life for his wife, Elizabeth, and their children.
That first volume, Harlem Shuffle, was followed by The Crook Manifesto; now Cool Machine — the description of Ray by an admiring heist merchant — brings it to a close. Ray supplements his furniture dealer income by discreetly fencing stolen goods — a connection to the criminal world inherited from his father. His official career has been crowned with the award of District Salesman of the Month (North West) and a trade magazine profile, but his wife Elizabeth needs money for her new travel company which dullard bankers won’t give a black woman, so Ray step in.
Told, like the others, in three interconnected sections, the novel follows Ray as he navigates the uneasy divide between respectability and crime. Against the backdrop of a changing Harlem in Ronald Reagan’s America, he is, as ever, forced to make difficult choices about ambition, loyalty, family and survival.
Combining the pace of a crime novel with a portrait of New York, including its hidden underworld, the book is social drama, a fiction with a non-fiction spine. The book has shades of Tom Wolfe about it, if Tom Wolfe had been a very different writer, that is. Whitehead explores themes of race, class, identity, and social mobility. Cool Machine is both an engrossing heist story and a nuanced examination of the moral compromises people make in pursuit of a better, or at least more fully funded, life. It is also extremely funny.
