Review | Colson Whitehead ends his Harlem Trilogy on a high note with ‘Cool Machine’

I wasn’t aware Pulitzer winner Colson Whitehead’s latest, Cool Machine, is a collection of three novellas. This fact has been mentioned on the back cover, but the font is small and life is short and I’d proceeded straight to the text. I read the first novella wondering why things seem to be tying up way too early, given that 200-odd pages remain. Then it strikes me. Oh my! Three cookies.

The ‘Cool Machine’ in Whitehead’s book is 1980s New York City. Each novella is centred around a different MacGuffin — the first involves Jesse Owens’ “Hitler Olympics” gold medal; the second is a mask, made by the Fang people of Gabon; and the third has the hero’s nephew, who’s gotten mixed up in a mob killing.

All three stories prominently feature Ray Carney, a furniture dealer with a side business as a fence for stolen goods. Ray has a happy marriage; he is principled, genial, observant, and financially comfortable. But as Kant pointed out, the human timber is fundamentally crooked. Some men drink, others write, and some, like Carney, are drawn to crime. Ray outsources the occasional physical violence to Pepper, an old beat-up and ever stoic associate.

Pepper is more than an associate; he is the lead in the second novella. Pepper is African-American, as are Ray and most of the other key characters. The ‘African-American’ aspect is important to Whitehead’s work. However, though it is put to good use, I don’t feel the racial aspect is particularly essential. The stories could be adapted to be about a Jewish furniture dealer or a Russian or an Italian or some other resilient ethnic group, marginal enough to have a grudge and ballsy enough to do something about it.

Lived-in feel

The plots in Cool Machine are the stuff of 70s Blaxploitation movies. The characters are ‘characters’ with little foibles and irreversible traits, and the author broods over his pets with a mother’s protectiveness. They have names like ‘The Melancholy Hitman’ and ‘The Rabbit’. Even Pepper, who lurches around with a mysterious stomach ailment, survives one violent situation after another.

And yet, despite all these limitations, or perhaps on account of them, I had a blast reading the book, the final part of Whitehead’s Harlem Trilogy. Its genre is the picaresque noir — pinot noir, one could call it — appealing rogues, women in distress, escape sequences, journeys, but regrettably, without the raunchiness to unbutton things. What sets this book truly apart, however, is the capacious writing.

The narrative has the habitability of a 19th century NYC brownstone equipped with the latest amenities. Look how the first story begins: “In all of Ray Carney’s years as a fence — he had been a reluctant fence and a ruthless fence, at times imperilled by his choices and, at others, the embodiment of crooked intelligence...” There has been much praise about Whitehead’s writing, and one can detect in this outpouring, a rather belated and tragic appreciation of what seems to have been lost in recent decades.

All in the details

Whitehead’s carnivalesque use of language is what English novelists were able to do before MFA programmes persuaded them that vapid interiority in pedestrian English is the hallmark of great art. His writing can pinpoint a minor detail with evocative precision (“…the Marlin, a narrow dive on 110th and Broadway with a décor inspired by an old leather shoe that lived in a drainage pipe”) and it can fill the canvas with a sweeping portrait of a city sagging on the ropes like an ageing boxer. Whitehead weaves through music subcultures, art shows in the Harlem, the city’s underground denizens, the furniture business’s patter, and small meditations, like where one should hide out while on the lam.

It is not often that a book comes along which reminds us literature can be fun. Could be fun, if we would just un-purse our lips. This is one of those books and English literature is richer for it.

Cool Machine

Colson Whitehead

Fleet

₹799

The reviewer is an author, most recently of The Coincidence Plot.