Colson Whitehead’s Cold Machine review – the final installment of the Harlem Trilogy is a free thriller | Fiction

Mein the summer of 1977 lightning struck a small station on the Hudson River, knocking out power across New York City. The two-night blackout led to mass looting as Harlem and Bronx youths swiped valuables from downtown stores. They took speakers and turntables to practice with at home. They taught themselves to scratch and mix, and sang self-titled scat into stolen microphones. Hip-hop, according to urban legend, was the child of lightning and theft.

It’s a crime, thinks Ray Carney, the tough hero of Colson Whitehead’s rollicking Cool Machine, the final installment of his Harlem Trilogy. Or the other way around, because the man doesn’t like rap music and is nursing an old-school smash-and-grab love affair. Over the years Carney has lived a fearless double life that would make Spider-Man proud, supplementing his furniture business on 125th Street with a profitable venture like an underground fence. In his undercover guise, he helps lead what he describes as “churn”: the movement of stolen goods through New York. The eagle stimulates the economy and helps revive the culture. It is similar to the city and the endocrine system.

The Harlem Trilogy, like its hero, is a head-scratcher, ambitious and far-reaching than his dimestore appearance would suggest. Carney’s tale can be enjoyed as a gang of canine gangs bound from high risk to a mysterious bag of loot to escape via a rat-infested back alley. But it is also – perhaps mainly – the story of New York over the years, and its independent groups of black and white people. Harlem Shufflethe first book in the series, covering the 1960s civil rights movement. Second, 2023 Crook’s Manifestoset in the 70s “Fear City”, as buildings collapse, murder rates rise and Carney’s store doubles as a blaxploitation film.

Now comes Cool Machine, the final title hit, which takes us back to the dirty, revolutionary 1980s. That means hip-hop on the stereo, graffiti on the subway and a huge gap between rich and poor. It means, in this case, a plot that plays out like a pop-art Marxist noir, full of traditional values ​​and class and race tensions.

Searching for a secret route to the five-star Waldorf Astoria, Carney encounters the Morlocks in the train depot beneath Manhattan, an underground tent city run by “Mayor Crotch”. People who are homeless on the street, Carney notes, are victims of the development above. “The more those at the top become rich, the more miserable they become and the more those at the bottom.” And the more abandoned and needy you are, the more you need to rebuild to escape them.

Carney is a creature of the world, he is also a middleman or bridge, directing cars up and down until the color line is shiny. Spanning three connected stories from 1981 to 1986, Cool Machine uncovers the seeds of the establishment of a 21st century culture in the trade of African artefacts and sports memorabilia. White and black cheaters argue over ownership of Jesse Owens’ Olympic medal. The Ngil mask from Gabon lights up the East Village art scene. Ten years ago, Carney’s boss Zippo’s girlfriend was shooting blaxploitation movies in the suburbs. Now he’s hanging out with the arthouse crowd, working on an adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 classic in which the N word is substituted for every bird. Hitchcock’s original film was always a metaphor for racism, Zippo says. So he’s just taking the subtext and making it text.

Whitehead originally envisioned the Harlem Trilogy as a romantic comedy, a break from the Pulitzer-winning ventures The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys. Cool Machine is mostly about the New York of his youth, his first experience, which only adds to the funky, free-spirited vibe. Whitehead maps the roads, signs and pops in from time to time with useful information. He takes a dark and scary corner of history and makes it bright, uplifting, even borderline family friendly.

It’s the distortion, ironically, that does the story justice. It adds grit and grandeur to the sugary beat of nostalgia. Churn, Carney has decided, is about more than the amount of stolen goods. They are the main scourge and riot of the city; Successive waves of immigrants are washing over the communities where people live. “Enclaves and ghettoes rose and fell and were reborn. That too was chaos – a song of death and rebirth in the squares and streets. You wake up to find that the city has opened another song when you weren’t looking.” Carney is now in his 50s and has one eye on the exit door. He is working hard to maintain his status, fighting the tides of a city as volatile and important as the Mississippi River. New York, he realizes, doesn’t care whether he lives or dies. It is true that everything is indifferent and it just goes on and on.