Colson Whitehead’s Last Heist

Go slowly. This is goodbye.

Colson Whitehead’s Cool Machine concludes one of the richest portraits of New York — a suave trilogy of novels that opened in the late 1950s with Harlem Shuffle.

Now, it’s the 1980s in a city where “the only permanent tenants were hustle and impermanence.” New buildings rise every day, but “the richer those up top got, the more miserable and numerous those below became.” Yuppies are taking over, and Reaganomics is engorging Wall Street while “cleaning out the flophouses and SROs, closing the institutions, cutting social services.”