Put Down Your Phone and Pick Up Cool Machine — You Won’t Regret It

I’ve been excited to read an advanced copy of Colson Whitehead’s Cool Machine (Doubleday, July 2026), the final volume of his Harlem Trilogy. If you’d like to wrestle yourself away from doomscrolling by diving into the old-fashioned art of reading smart contemporary literature, I couldn’t recommend a better book to start with.

Cool Machine offers three knuckle-biting yet drolly humorous stories packed within 368 pages, each providing a different window into experience through the eyes of Ray Carney, a successful Harlem furniture salesman, and his family, spanning from 1981 to 1986. Carney and his fast-fingered compatriots provide plenty of diversionary flashbacks to their glory days as master fences. When a bank turns down Carney’s wife’s application for a business loan for her new travel agency, he dips his aging toes back in with one more job, led by a criminal urban legend, in order to secure the extra cash.

The plot jumps to 1983, when Carney’s wife Elizabeth enlists her husband’s friend Pepper to perform what ought to be a simple, one-off bodyguard gig — accompanying her best client to purchase an artwork at an East Village nightclub. A professional thief, Pepper battles a stomach issue and has to navigate the baffling new con of modern art, taggers, music samplers, and avaricious art collectors. Throw in an elusive hitman who commits a string of terrifyingly grisly murders to “send a message” on behalf of his client, and Pepper has to assert his own brand of street smarts.

The third story, set in 1986, has Carney joining forces with Pepper once again to shield and rescue his nephew, who’s on the lam after witnessing a shocking murder. Doing so offers Carney a chance at redemption.

Woven between these action-packed narratives, each character offers their own astute assessment of the city against a bustling backdrop of 1980s New York, a city just recovering from the brink.  The book is rife with references to the era immediately recognizable to those who’ve lived it, from “Nobody Beats the Wiz” to a hilarious running joke about handwritten dashboard signs reading “NO RADIO,” to wickedly humorous observations on the long-term effects Manhattan can afflict on any resident’s psyche. 

The last big novel set in 1980s New York of recent memory was, of course, Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. Bonfire delved into Wall Street hubris, a world altogether different from Whitehead’s magnificent tale of a Harlem furniture salesman versed in the city’s underbelly of crime, and grind and grift.  I don’t usually compare authors, but I do need to point out that Whitehead’s writing is stiletto-sharp, incisive, undeniably native, and rings forth with clarity, whereas Wolfe comes across as that back-of-the-classroom smart aleck tipped insouciantly back on his chair legs, offering little more than memorably rude, flashy, and alliteratively cutesy sound bites. I can’t help the comparison, given that one of the characters in Cool Machine delivers a sly takedown of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. Though one must acknowledge the context: the smart aleck who traffics in rude, flashy sound bites aptly suits the milieu Wolfe was writing about.

Cool Machine captures the soul of the city through the eyes of one particular family of street-smart Harlem denizens you haven’t yet seen on screen — Spike Lee, if you’re listening, take note. Whitehead brilliantly nails the dynamics of family dysfunction with genuine heart, set thrillingly against the raw-knuckled machinations of crime and the brand of striving induced by the vertical backdrop of Gotham’s grime, grandeur, and ever-churning landscape.

RECOMMEND.