Gleaming ... Can’t help but impart a nostalgic vibe, too. This isn’t because Whitehead’s prose is autumnal or tamped down but because the reader realizes that this is our last time around the block with this memorable set of misfits and nonconformists ... The cultural commentary is playful and urbane ... Most saliently, this is a heavyweight New York novel. Whitehead cracks the city open like a crab and pulls out the meat.
Whitehead repurposes ready-made narratives to explore underrepresented areas of Black experience; he consistently commits to the bit and then twists it, finding emotional resonances where you’d least expect them ... Whitehead celebrates, in deliberately unsentimental fashion, the variety of Black ingenuity and splendor on offer in marginalized circles ... Sophisticated.
A dizzyingly brilliant measure of the versatility and depth of the acclaimed author’s literary talent ... The intricacy with which Whitehead details the planning and execution of this caper marks him as a top-tier researcher — he’s drawn on many primary sources to ground this work of fiction in historical fact ... A modern masterpiece and an ode to New York, no matter that rats skitter and cockroaches scamper underfoot.
Crime fiction without apology and little interest in irony or distancing effects. It’s not a cheeky parody of crime fiction or piercing commentary on crime fiction. It’s crime fiction: propelled by narrative; populated by colorful but believable characters larger enough than life to fit into life if only life were larger; and written in tight, muscular prose designed to entertain and, in the process of entertaining, provoke for the sake of a moral imperative.
One of the richest portraits of New York ... Ultimately a meditation on growing old without surrendering one’s appetite for life. That might sound melancholy, but it’s probably illegal to have this much fun writing a crime novel. Like the finest renovators, Whitehead moves into the antique building, treasures the old molding, and manages to construct a space that respects the past while offering something wholly new. He’s perfected a voice of mock formality shot through with morbid humor, absurdity, and gore.
Cool Machine is a hugely satisfying conclusion to a towering achievement, and rounds off the trilogy with a thematic focus on aspiration and change — or 'churn' ... Includes a large cast of vividly wrought characters that come in and out of focus over the course of the trilogy ... In every genre he works in, Whitehead is a writer of seemingly effortless style ... Offers a rich vision of both the nature of individual aspiration and the history of this period in Harlem ... This trilogy of unapologetic crime novels may be Whitehead’s most important and affecting work yet.
Even crooks and thugs retire eventually, and in Cool Machine, the fast-paced final volume of Colson Whitehead’s brilliant Harlem Trilogy, furniture salesman and part-time fence Ray Carney and his sidekick, Pepper, are getting old and winding down. ... A blend of bone-chilling violence, humour and sharp social criticism, the last in the trilogy traces not just the evolution of Carney, but of New York City itself.
Blistering with energy ... Not recognisably crime fiction, although it pastiches the noir genre’s hard-boiled elements. A whirlwind read, it is peppered with insights into race and pop culture, and overflows with satire and — perhaps surprisingly — humanity.
Whitehead just fizzes with ideas ... I doubt any of our young tartan noir blades could write anything as intelligent, emotional, stylish, funny, incisive, wise and – dammit – cool as Cool Machine. This has sass, smarts and heart. A reader could not wish for more.
Not nearly enough time has been spent on the jokes. These books are so hardboiled, they bounce ... As Cool Machine draws Whitehead’s trilogy to a close, with as much contemplation as gunfire, his provocation is that these kinds of men – and these kinds of ambitions – aren’t nearly as far apart as America likes to imagine. You might call it spitting distance.
Rollicking ... More ambitious and far-reaching than its dimestore facade would suggest ... He takes a dark and dangerous corner of history and makes it feel illuminated, magnified, even borderline family-friendly.
If Cool Machine occasionally falls short of its predecessors, it’s because the propulsive pleasures of the caper sometimes give way to the compulsions of the urban historian. Whitehead has always been fascinated by the sedimentary layers of New York...and at times all the Gotham lore feels indulgent, slowing the narrative pulse. But there’s no doubting Whitehead’s feel for the city. Taken together, the books amount to a street-level social history of modern New York told through fences, gangsters, hookers, politicians, landlords, developers and dreamers — a Dickensian gallery of rogues through whom an entire metropolis comes into view.
The truth is that Whitehead is a bewilderingly uneven writer. The quality of his fiction varies not just from book to book but also from page to page, even from sentence to sentence ... There are pleasures here – the neatness of a well-made plot among them – and some stray jewels ('A rickety fan shovelled cigarette smoke around'; 'The taxi puttered like a run-down sub in the uptown gloom'). But there are also dull bits, too much padding and too few persuasively rendered human beings. Perhaps we’ll be lucky: perhaps the genre turn, in Whitehead’s work and elsewhere, will be followed by a literary turn – a turn, that is, back towards character, into the heart of the unmapped real.
Combining the pace of a crime novel with a portrait of New York, including its hidden underworld, the book is social drama, a fiction with a non-fiction spine ... Also extremely funny.
Electrifying ... This is a masterwork of crime fiction infused with labyrinthine suspense; brilliant, witty, and dynamic social insights; and profound questions of survival.
Perhaps Cool Machine is Whitehead’s own attempt to answer life’s big questions through his own art. Whether he discovered his answers or not, the philosophical crime novel/love story to New York City is a must-read of the summer, especially for New Yorkers who will recognize echoes of the past or new arrivals who will come to realize that while many things change, New York City’s creative heartbeat remains constant ... Cool Machine closes the Harlem Trilogy on its sharpest question yet: who gets to own the things worth stealing?
Whitehead’s justly celebrated Harlem Trilogy comes to a triumphant, satisfying conclusion ... A master novelist in full command of his powers as a storyteller, prose stylist, and social observer.
