Cool Machine

Whitehead concludes his Harlem Trilogy (after Crook Manifesto) with a transcendent and wildly entertaining novel in which his recurring characters grapple with the ways their lives are defined by crime and the city they call home. In 1981, furniture dealer and semiretired fence Ray Carney, now an empty nester, helps move a hot sapphire necklace, telling himself he’s taking the risk for his wife, a travel agent trying to put out her own shingle. Soon, though, he gets in deeper than he’d bargained for, joining a crew for an ambitious heist at the Waldorf Astoria hotel. He compares his evolution as a criminal to the “churn” of the ever-changing metropolis, where transplants to the city outnumber those who left for the suburbs. Two years later, Carney’s old friend and associate Pepper faces a reckoning of his own. Getting on in years and stumbling after a botched job, Pepper commits to recovering a precious African mask from an unscrupulous downtown art dealer despite feeling left behind by the city, where “maybe the game had changed, too.” The saga concludes in 1986, when Carney weighs how much to help a nephew in danger. The heists, stakeouts, and showdowns are rendered with grit and precision, but the real wallops come in breathtaking riffs on the city’s magnetic force, for instance when Carney, remembering the 1981 film Escape from New York, recognizes that leaving town would be like “going on the lam from yourself.” It’s the greatest New York novel in years. Agent: Nicole Aragi, Aragi Inc. (July)