22 July 2026

How good is Colson Whitehead?

He’s got the film adaptations, two Pulitzers and support from the Obamas – but he’s not yet mastered his craft

Illustration by Daniel Fishel

The approval of Oprah and Barack Obama. Two Pulitzer prizes. Novels adapted for TV and the cinema (The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, respectively). Colson Whitehead is clearly doing something – perhaps many things – right. He is a literary novelist of serious intent who writes books with well-made plots, characters whom readers can root for or despise, and themes that go right to the heart of contemporary debates about race in America. Academics rate him highly. So do civilian readers. He may be the US’s most beloved writer.

This might sound as if I’m setting Whitehead up for a hatchet job. But let’s not get carried away. He is a force for good in the world, and we need as many forces for good as we can muster in these philistine digital days. But perhaps some mild scepticism about the quality of Whitehead’s work is warranted, if only to put some interesting dents in what has been, for the most part, a smooth unanimity of response.

The truth is that Whitehead is a bewilderingly uneven writer. The quality of his fiction varies not just from book to book but also from page to page, even from sentence to sentence. If his strengths are an intermittently sharp sense of prose rhythm and a fabulist’s gift for reimagining in striking ways the horrors and victories of African American history, his recurring faults are sententiousness and flat characters. He often veers into sentimentality (from his new novel: “time in the joint, the various joints of this world, changed a man”); he often overwrites.

What you tend to remember from Whitehead’s novels are not characters but scenes and conceits. The pages from The Underground Railroad (2016) in which the slave Big Anthony is tortured, mutilated and finally roasted alive on the grounds of a plantation in Georgia have stayed with me in horrific detail since I first read them a decade ago. What hasn’t stayed with me is any sense of Big Anthony as a character, nor, really, any sense of the other characters who populate the novel. The malevolent slave catcher, Arnold Ridgeway, and Cora, the slave who escapes north on an actual underground railroad: they are not so much characters as figures generating specific narrative effects, and they last no longer in the reader’s imagination than the effects they generate.

This is something you can say about genre fiction, of course. The characters in this type of novel are usually a means and not an end. Academics have pegged Whitehead’s work as an exemplary instance of “the genre turn” in contemporary literary fiction – the tendency, that is, for literary writers, in a marketplace under siege, to dress their work in the alluring outfits of popular fiction (Cormac McCarthy going dystopian in The Road, Jennifer Egan going science-fictional in A Visit from the Goon Squad, Ottessa Moshfegh’s medieval fantasy Lapvona, and so forth).

As a survival strategy for literary fiction in the age of streaming TV and the internet, the genre turn has been largely successful. The impact of this strategy on novels themselves is perhaps more of an open question. Gains in narrative traction and linguistic resourcefulness have sometimes come at the cost of attention devoted on the literary novel’s true subject: character. Whitehead’s work, since his 2011 zombie novel Zone One, has been a series of cases in point.

None more so, perhaps, than Cool Machine, the third instalment in a trilogy of African American noir novels centred around the New York furniture salesman, business owner and former criminal fence Ray Carney, following Harlem Shuffle (2021) and Crook Manifesto (2023). If Carney ends up more memorable than many other Whitehead characters, this is perhaps because sheer weight of pages, across three substantial books, goes some way towards making up for an essential flatness. Carney is an African American riff on the family-man-who-leads-a-secret-life-of-crime trope, and there isn’t really a whole lot more to him than that, except that he carries a heavier freight of history – his own and the capital-H kind – as the novels progress.

There is big ambition at work here. Harlem Shuffle is mostly set in the Sixties, Crook Manifesto in the Seventies and Cool Machine in the Eighties, and each novel has a backing track of key events and presences, making the trilogy a kind of underground social history of black New York. The new book is dedicated to “New York Fuckin’ City,” which, unusually for a dedication, gives you a fair sense of the novel that follows.

Cool Machine is really three novellas bound together. In the first, Carney is dragged out of semi-retirement to help a master thief named Uncle Rich on one last job – stealing, from the Waldorf Astoria, an Olympic medal once owned by Jesse Owens. In the second, Carney’s criminal pal Pepper gets mixed up in the downtown art scene, in a Maltese Falcon-ish hunt for a stolen Ghanaian tribal mask. The third novella brings strands together. A theme coalesces: restitution, the possible fates of African and African American objects looted or pawned by white people.

The noir novel, now almost a fossilised mode, continues to attract writers for reasons of style. All sorts of valuables can be smuggled in under cover of the cynical locutions of a gimlet-eyed gumshoe or a wised-up wiseguy. This, plainly, is Whitehead’s game, in the Carney trilogy. But the best noir writers – Dashiell Hammett, Chester Himes – always kept things brutally trim. Whitehead doesn’t know when to stop.

“The accountant cooked the books for one of the more plodding but financially circumspect crime families, working hard to convince the Feds that the most profitable driving school in North America just happened to be in Piscataway, New Jersey (it wasn’t).” The final parenthesis, here, is both over-explicit (we don’t need to be told the driving school isn’t on the level) and confusing (are you saying the driving school isn’t in Piscataway?). It waves from the end of the sentence like a little flag, signalling a basic lack of confidence that the prose will convey its meaning.

Next sentence: “The lawyer specialised in green cards and other official documentation for Albanian hit men, a surprisingly steady clientele, who knew?” This is meant to sound hard-eyed, blackly funny. It mimics the diseased irony of Hammett. But those Albanian hitmen – murderers – are present merely as a token in the game of mimicry.

In fact, the actual presiding spirit of the prose would seem to be the compulsive rambler Thomas Pynchon: “The man in the club – Void – worked for Nando Schmidt, the owner of Zilch Gallery in the East Village.” Or: “A former clubhouse and numbers bank for a Bumpy Johnson lieutenant named Cookie Reynolds, it had been closed since Valentine’s Day 1968, when Cookie’s fiancée stabbed him to death with an ice pick. Neck meat, upper torso, modern romance.” These background details are just that: background detail. We don’t care about Bumpy Johnson or Cookie Reynolds. They are furniture – set-dressing put in place to convey a noir ambience.

In a yuppie bar: “Carney looked around at the buffalo-wing gnawers, the light-beer sippers, the wine-cooler aficionados.” Writing like this seems vivid, but in fact it dehumanises the created world, depopulates it, replaces specificity with knowing tags. Whitehead’s habit of swinging into irrelevant backstory – as seen with Cookie Reynolds – enforces a similar reduction. Ray Carney passes a Manhattan storefront, and Whitehead digresses into the history of who used to own it, why it closed down, et cetera. This isn’t really social history, or classic realist texture, but a kind of desperately energetic simulacrum of both. It makes you realise that Cool Machine isn’t really an impersonation of a genre novel. It’s an impersonation of a literary novel. It’s got the noir moves. But what it ain’t got is the literary novel’s defining richnesses of context and characterisation.

Those noir moves: a hotel has “décor inspired by an old leather shoe that lived in a drainage pipe” (pretty good). “He spoke grudgingly, as if language was an imposition, like he was a brat being forced into nice clothes for church” (not so good). A minor character “had a triangular goatee so precise as to embody a geometrical theorem” (fine). The major characters are another matter. Uncle Rich, for instance, is a cliché: he is the improbably intellectual crook. Of a heist plan: “I got the idea from the memoirs of Võ Nguyên Giáp, the famous Viet Cong general.” Ellen, Carney’s wife, mostly occupies a space designated “main character’s wife”. One minor villain is called the Melancholy Hitman. And that’s what he is: a melancholy hitman, “Herb to his friends.” Ho-ho.

There are pleasures here – the neatness of a well-made plot among them – and some stray jewels (“A rickety fan shovelled cigarette smoke around”; “The taxi puttered like a run-down sub in the uptown gloom”). But there are also dull bits, too much padding and too few persuasively rendered human beings. Perhaps we’ll be lucky: perhaps the genre turn, in Whitehead’s work and elsewhere, will be followed by a literary turn – a turn, that is, back towards character, into the heart of the unmapped real.

Kevin Power’s books include White City (Scribner)

Cool Machine
Colson Whitehead
Fleet, 368pp, £22

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[Further reading: Kevin Keegan’s mighty life]