Review: "Cherry" by Nico Walker

Cherry, the debut novel of Nico Walker and  one of the most talked about books of last year, also feels like one of 2018’s most divisive books after a few reviews I have read from people whose opinions I greatly respect, and it is due to its divisive nature that I found myself liking it so much. It is a story utterly free of any literary pretense whatsoever, running towards its ambiguous finish line almost purely on passion, anger, regret and a dormant sense of hope. But it is also a very vulgar book, one I was keen to enjoy wholeheartedly before my 20’s, with many scenes of transgressive behavior like graphic depictions of sex, violence, and lots and lots of drug use. It is one of two novels that came out last year that deals directly with the opioid crisis that is ravaging the Midwest, the other being Stephen Markley’s Ohio. I like both, but this is a different kind of book all together, feeling less like a novel and more like a thinly veiled memoir in story form like Mitchell S. Jackson’s The Residue Years. And this feels even more accurate when you look at the history behind its publication, which might add more to this book’s notoriety than I would like to admit (and my affection for it, since books by prisoners or about prison are some of my favorite kinds of books to read). The book’s narrator, and obvious stand in for Walker himself, seems to have sprouted up from nowhere when the book begins after a startling prologue. Not really and everyman or even a victim of circumstances (he’s decidedly middle class), he exists in a grey area, beset by disappointment and ennui, and when he meets Emily, the “one to break his heart”, he sense that his life has found meaning, but the reader and maybe Walker in hindsight from his jail cell, know differently. His love for Emily takes him down the dreary road of addiction, to a stint in the Army as a medic, back to addiction and finally to robbing banks, which is what put Walker in prison. It is catalogued in excruciating, sometimes frustrating detail that took some time to get used to, but it is effortlessly compelling once you do. What I found most interesting was each section share similarities that you would not expect, like how the section in Iraq and the section right after where Emily and the narrator are deep into their mutual drug addictions have an overstuffed cast of characters with shady motivations the reader is never sure because the narrator feels the same way, whether that be an order from a higher ranking officer or what the couple must do to obtain their next hit. The book is filled with memorable scenes that are still lingering in my mind, from the funny, like the section where the narrator’s testicles become contused, to the sad, like the scene where Walker describes what a few of his fellow soldiers do to rats, which recalled a similar scene in All Quiet on the Western Front and a scene toward the end where a fellow junkie brings a baby to a drug deal. It is all overlaid with this sense of longing and regret, a wish to right terrible wrongs and make up for lost time, which I hope the success of this novel does for Walker, who seems to have a bright future when he is released some time next year. 

Rating: 5/5