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Cool Machine by Colson Whitehead

If you enjoyed Whitehead’s first two crime novels in his Harlem trilogy—Harlem Shuffle and Crook Manifesto—you’ll probably want to read Cool Machine.  But I wouldn’t recommend starting with it even though critics (other critics) are in full rave mode about it.  If you do insist on beginning with Cool Machine, I can say that Whitehead strokes enough old information into the new novel so that it can stand alone.  Actually, that should be “move alone” because Whitehead has upped the action quotient, replacing much of the charm of his up-from-nothing Black striver Ray Carney selling furniture to the middle class and into middle age with cinematic action and gouts of violent harm. 

Colson Whitehead’s Long Con

A professional slight kicks off Colson Whitehead’s third crime caper. Harlem merchant Ray Carney has just wrapped up an interview with a furniture magazine he adores when he’s called downtown to meet with an, ahem, associate. Carney, who moonlights as a fence, assumes the rendezvous will engender some new criminal opportunity, but it’s a trap. His colleague is a hostage, and the armed captors don’t initially recognize Carney as a fellow crook. “Don’t want to beat up the janitor,” one says after Carney is identified—a baldly racist remark. The quick-thinking salesman manages to wiggle out of the setup and save his partner, but the encounter nettles him. “He had rebuilt his store at considerable financial and psychological cost, received an industry honor, and in five minutes these white men had wrung all pleasure from his victory,” Whitehead writes. “He was fucking Regional Dealer of the goddamn Month,” Carney thinks to himself, setting the record straight.

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