Book of the Day

From the review

Ray Carney spends the opening stretch of Cool Machine collecting an honor he can't put on a business card without qualifiers: 1981's Dealer of the Month at Sterling Furniture, chosen for the showroom he shows daylight customers, not the back room where stolen goods change hands after dark. None of that reputation is worth anything to a loan officer. When the bank turns down his wife Elizabeth's application to open a travel agency, Carney does the thing he keeps telling himself he's done with: takes one more job, and discovers the job belongs to somebody far more dangerous than he bargained for. Colson Whitehead has always written Harlem like he's cataloguing it room by room, and this third volume of the trilogy keeps that same discipline even as its map widens: the story ranges from a restaurant near the top of a Manhattan tower down to the marshes of the Meadowlands, and plenty of the city in between. This is 1980s New York, and Whitehead keeps two images running side by side without ever forcing the comparison: towers climbing over Manhattan and displaced people sheltering in the abandoned tunnels underneath them. He doesn't editorialize about it. He just puts a fence, a furniture showroom, and those tunnels in the same book and lets a reader do the math on who the boom is actually for.