Review: "The Nickel Boys" by Colson Whitehead

I’m always interested in the follow-up to a great success, whether that be of the cinematic variety or the literary variety, so when I heard Colson Whitehead was publishing his follow-up to his awards sweeping novel The Underground Railroad, I was immediately interested. The Underground Railroad lived up to its hype, telling an engaging story of alternate history in all its ugliness, beauty and complexity and is surely to be one of the high points of 21^stcentury literature as the years roll on. But what was he going to give us next: more of the same or something totally different? It could have been anything for a writer with varying interests like Whitehead and his new book The Nickel Boys offers something new from him, but with the same attitude, eloquence and grandiosity his fans have come to expect from him. It reminded me a lot of the trajectory of the Coen Brothers after No Country for Old Men swept the Oscars, giving us the screwball Burn After Reading and the proudly esoteric and brooding A Serious Man. Whitehead has already accomplished more than most writers can do in a handful of lifetimes, and while this books is sure to have some detractors, I am not one of them. It is up there with his best books, a notch below John Henry Days and his preceding awards collector, but it might be his angriest and most cynical book, a tale of wronged young boys, victims of a system whose carelessness bred the monsters who tried, and succeeded a depressing number of times, to destroy them. Based on a harrowing true story of a reform school that operated in Florida, gives lurid headlines a tragic human face with Elwood, a young man at the dawn of the 60’s who finds himself the victim of despicable injustice and sentenced to hell, as he likes to think. We first meet him as he haunts the hotel where his Grandma works, barred from certain sections because of the color of his skin. He has a relatively stable life: college bound and inspired by the burgeoning Civil rights movements. But an offered car ride in a stolen vehicle gets him sent to The Nickel Academy, a place meant to shape young boys into men, but, as Elwood finds out on his first trip the “White House” is a hellish prison where abuse, physical and sexual, are the norm and where boys disappear “out back” and never return. It is a familiar story, but Whitehead adds layers of intrigue and subtext in the books slim 210 pages, like how injustice seems to follow Elwood (his first trip to the White House was because he tried to stop a fight), and his ambivalence toward the hopeful future he hears Dr. King preach about, given more credence and poignancy in the book’s shocking and brilliant epilogue, which I suspect will divide audiences. At times this is a hard book to read (and it seems to know that, spending scant time with the villains and focusing wholly on their victims), but it feels like an important book for our troubled times. Plus, it is a damn good book from a damn great writer. 

Rating: 5/5