Going Straight

Cool Machine a novel by Colson Whitehead.  Doubleday.  352 pp. $30.00.  *****

I know of no other writer who is so satisfying as both a literary novelist and a thriller writer as Colson Whitehead.  Graham Greene was great at both, but seemed to keep the genres separate.  Someone like Elmore Leonard is a superb storyteller, period, and one of the best dialogue writers ever, but his books don’t satisfy as literary novels.  But Whitehead’s crime trilogy, and most recently Cool Machine, had me on the edge of my seat, but at the same time was a fascinating portrait of Harlem over a period of three decades.  I can easily see myself reading the whole trilogy again.

At the same time, there’s a finality to this volume that makes it different from the others.  It would be a spoiler to say why, but the trilogy works well together as a single work.

As in the other oboks, there are three novella length narratives in this novel, separated by several years.  In the first, which takes place in 1981, we find Ray Carney, the furniture salesman whose life and career we’ve followed throughout, once again slightly overextending.  His furniture business is doing well again after a ruinous fire; his wife Elizabeth’s career in real estate is also taking off, partly because properties in Harlem are becoming more valuable.  Their children are out of the house and doing well.

But Ray always wants a little bit more, and he’s working as a fence for an old friend of his because he sees a chance to make some easy cash.  But his friend has violated the number one rule of such operations; he hasn’t told Ray where he got the sapphires they’re trying to sell.  A fence needs to know that so he can be circumspect about who he offers them to.  A vicious group of white criminals made the original heist, and someone stole from them; they now want to get their hands on the original stones and the person who swiped them.  They keep referring to a man named Uncle Rich.

Uncle Rich can only be described as a master criminal, the stuff of legends; he did some work with Ray’s father in the old days.  He’s so big-time and legendary that at one point he staged his own death, so people would think he was gone and wouldn’t have any idea what international criminal was pulling off these ingenious heists.  He’s brilliant at planning and picking crews and is planning another job when Ray gets in touch with him, letting him know who’s after him.  I have to say that, if Ray were interested in continuing his criminal enterprises, he would have met his perfect mentor, because Uncle Rich is planning a huge job, with a crack crew.  Ray just wants to get out from under the thumb of the white guys who are pursuing them.  He stays with Uncle Rich long enough to do that, but in the meantime works a couple of jobs with him.

Uncle Rich might be the most memorable character in the trilogy, and the job he’s currently engaged in—retrieving one of Jesse Owen’s gold medals from a safe in the Waldorf-Astoria, where it is awaiting a memorabilia auction—is fascinating.  For Uncle Rich the job is personal; he doesn’t think Owens should have had to sell the medal in the first place.  But they carry out the heist through the bowels of the subway system, along with a crew of homeless folks who are camped there, and the suspense is breathtaking.  You could make a movie out of this episode alone.[1]

The second episode features Ray’s friend Pepper, who was the most memorable character until Uncle Rich came along.  He has appeared in all three of the Harlem novels, and is a cold-blooded criminal, but the kind you root for because he’s had a hard life and is just trying to get by.  He also has his own code of ethics, though they have nothing to do with not breaking the law.  In any case, I was glad to see him return, though he, like all of us, is getting older.  He has terrible stomach problems, which sound like a bleeding ulcer, and he’s constantly dealing with the pain and difficulty of his condition.  He’s the man we’d like to see retire.  But he doesn’t seem to have any prospects for that.

Pepper in this case is working for Elizabeth; one of her real estate clients is involved in a shady attempt to buy a piece of African art; the seller—who seems to be playing one buyer off against another—keeps changing the price and the venue.  He’s now settled on some vague locale in alphabet city (a very funky neighborhood in 1983) and wants the money in cash; the buyer in this case sounds naïve, but he really wants this piece of art.  Elizabeth suggests Pepper as a bodyguard.

Pepper knows nothing about the art world, but he knows a scam when he sees it.  They wind up at a very sketchy bar/disco in the wee hours of the morning, the customer holding onto, and refusing to surrender to Pepper, a bag containing $80,000 in cash.  Pepper’s ulcer kicks up at the worst possible time, and while he’s puking his guts out in the bathroom somebody knocks over his client and grabs the money.  No one at that point has even seen the work of art.  Pepper isn’t in Harlem anymore; he’s in a world he knows nothing about.

But as I said, he has his own set of standards and a lot of pride.  He’ll get the money back if it kills him.  And it might: among the people searching for the artwork is a hired assassin working for somebody else who also wants that piece of art; he kills the guy who stole the money from Pepper, kills another man who has shown interest in the work.  It’s obvious that Pepper is next, and Colson Whitehead is not the kind of author who lets a character live because he’s a favorite (see The Nickel Boys).  The conclusion of this episode is another thriller.

In the final narrative, Ray looks back to an earlier time.  His cousin Freddie was in a way the person who got him into a criminal life (though he also had a genetic proclivity from his father), but Freddie has long since died of an overdose.  Before he did, though, he fathered a child with a young woman named Josephine, and she has been trying to keep him on the straight and narrow.  He’s gotten a great job as the driver and go-to guy for a white lawyer in Queens, but as it turns out, the man has been on the take from some governmental corruption in New York.  The stuff sounds pretty take by current-day standards, businesses giving people bribes to do work for the city, but one of the deals goes south and Freddie’s son winds up as witness to a murder.  We at least think that’s the whole problem.  As it turns out, there was one more thing he hasn’t told us.  He’s on the lam, in any case.  And Ray has to find a way to help him.

The way he does that is, to say the very least, unique, and also a superbly satisfying end to the trilogy.  It isn’t sappy, and isn’t unbelievable, but it’s a real turnaround.  We have a feeling that Ray, and perhaps Colson Whitehead, are finished with crime for the time being.  If you look at the man’s publishing history, there’s no telling what comes next.

[1] Colson Whithead recently appeared on Turner Classic Movies, picking two movies for their Saturday night showings.  He apparently was a latchkey kid who spent a lot of time on the VCR while he was waiting for his parents to get home from work.  He picked The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing.  Two excellent choices.