Ed Koch

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.

The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe’s romp through the status and racial anxieties of 1980s New York, begins with an unnamed mayor being Mau-Maued by Harlem activists. As he soaks up the abuse, he fantasises about the confrontation spreading: Come down from your swell co-ops, you general partners and merger lawyers! It’s the Third World down there!... Staten Island! Do you Saturday do-it-yourselfers really think you’re snug in your little rug? You don’t think the future knows how to cross a bridge? This fictional world, a collision of riches and poverty and criminal justice and electoral politics, maps neatly on to the period described in Jonathan Mahler’s new book.