Literature | »Cool Machine« by Colson Whitehead: Give me noise, dirt and fight!

Greetings from the 80s: John Carpenter's cult film "The Rattlesnake." Photo: imago/Mary Evans Ray Carney, who is now getting on in years, actually wants to stay out of all illegal business. But once again his past catches up with the black furniture dealer from Harlem, son of a legendary neighborhood gangster. So he has no choice but to take part in a Rififi-like robbery coup. The lost gold medal of Olympic champion Jesse Owens is stolen from a safe in the luxury hotel Waldorf-Astoria.

"Cool Machine" is the furious finale of Colson Whitehead's Harlem trilogy, which began five years ago. After "Harlem Shuffle" was about the civil rights movement and the militant 60s and "The Rules of the Game" was about the harsh 70s in the run-down Big Apple, "Cool Machine" takes place in the iconic 80s. In addition to early rap and hip-hop booming through the streets, the first signs of the great real estate appreciation and the neoliberal turnaround are becoming noticeable in the otherwise very dilapidated New York.

Like the other parts, "Cool Machine" is not told as a classic novel with a story arc; rather, the 450-page book consists of several interleaved, almost anecdotal stories from the first half of the 80s. Of course, it is primarily a crime novel, but the book also offers a unique literary historiography of urban space and its social relationships.

The film “The Rattlesnake” appears again and again as a unifying motif and pop culture marker of the 80s. John Carpenter's dystopian science fiction classic, starring Kurt Russell in the title role, is set in a near-future New York that has been converted into a prison.

At one point, Ray Carney, on the run from rival crooks, even finds himself in a disused part of the New York subway, where people live underground just like in the apocalyptic film.

“They emerged from the darkness, clambering onto the platform from all directions, heralded by a rush of pungent human stench. Half a dozen of them, ragged and with disheveled hair - the people who lived on the edges, the exiles and the dropped out, they advanced like a creature of the underground itself."

The New York through which Carney runs is also as violent and lawless as the film's fiction. This time it is less the police officers who are using violence against Carney and his associates, but rather white gangsters who mostly come from outside and fail miserably due to the harsh reality of the Big Apple.

Once Carney and his friends are supposed to be duped in a jointly planned coup, but they successfully defend themselves. Then a killer is after Carney's close friend Pepper, who walks around New York with all the contempt of a conservative, reactionary small-town man from the Midwest and gives free rein to his racist hatred. And a young Italian mafia snob who shows no mercy tries to get rid of Carney's nephew, who unwillingly witnessed a murder.

Colson Whitehead tells the story of Harlem and New York as a story of crime. It's just that criminal acts change over the decades. The Waldorf-Astoria coup, where Jesse Owens' gold medal is essentially stolen back by the black community, is actually about digging underground, primarily about stealing large quantities of coaxial cable, which is in short supply, is needed for the expansion of the cable television network and represents huge business. The mafia will soon no longer only be involved in drug trafficking, the exploitation of sex work and blackmail. Suddenly it's about real estate, insurance fraud and the expansion of the city's infrastructure. The line between businessmen and gangsters becomes even more blurred in Whitehead's novel about the 1980s than it was before.

Of course, the long-established upper class families are also involved again, whose murderous power the furniture dealer from the precarious north of Manhattan had already felt in earlier years. Except suddenly they want to buy Carney's houses in Harlem. The struggle for revaluation is becoming increasingly fierce. For the man from Harlem, who has slowly worked his way up over the decades, it is clear that he is still not one of those who has the say in this process of change. But Carney and his community won't let anyone silence them. Despite all the social tensions, family disputes, economic abysses, criminal intrigues, generational divides and despite the violent everyday life that characterizes almost all social relationships, the characters from Harlem who struggle to live together always pull together in solidarity.

In the big finale, Ray Carney has to put everything on one card, not without first toying with the idea of ​​giving up all the solidarity and saving his own skin first. Whitehead's characters are simply not cocky heroes, but rather normal people, even if their everyday lives are sometimes hard. "Give me noise, dirt and fight, then I'll be fine," is the motto that Carney says to himself at the end like an incantation.

The great appeal of the novel lies in the numerous details with which Whitehead fills this large historical painting. No matter whether it's the small, shabby bars of Harlem, where yesterday the gangsters met and today suddenly white yuppies are sitting around, or whether it's about the birth of rap music.

So if you want to come along on car rides through run-down Harlem with its wasteland-like vacant lots, in soul food restaurants, in the back rooms of improvised command posts of organized crime, if you want to experience how white supremacists in Harlem get their shit together and how furniture dealer Ray Carney never fails to think about the right furnishings, you shouldn't miss this book.

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