Depravity

Cool Machine, the final novel in Colson Whitehead’s Harlem trilogy (following Harlem Shuffle and Crook Manifesto), is another tour de force and a fitting conclusion to the Uptown peregrinations of his endearing protagonist Ray Carney, a successful Harlem furniture salesman and part-time fence. It’s an old-school crime caper, set in 1980s New York against the backdrop of Mayor Koch’s rapidly gentrifying city, told in three interconnected sections excoriating Reagan-era capitalism. The ubiquitous construction works, graffiti and corruption are fuelled by the twin deities of power and money.

Has there been a better novel this century than Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation? There might not have been. The book was a hit when it came out in 2018 and had a second wind during the pandemic, when readers found themselves ‘resonating’ with its cabin-fever plot. Not that there was much plot: the novel follows a beautiful young woman marooned in her New York apartment, where she mainly watches TV and pops pills like they’re Pringles. There’s more plot in Moshfegh’s latest novel Lapvona. We’re not in contemporary America any more but in somewhere like medieval Europe, and the characters aren’t ‘prettier than Sharon Stone’ but proper old-school mingers, all tooth and gangle and belly.