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

Review: "Apex Hides the Hurt" by Colson Whitehead

Thankfully Colson Whitehead’s worst novel is also his shortest. Apex Hides the Hurt, his third novel is perplexing confusing and neither of those is a compliment. His work varies for me, with books like The Underground Railroad and John Henry Days being fantastic, The Intuitionist and Zone One being good but a little too odd and Sag Harbor being a disappointment, but this book seems like a failed experiment in odd narration and a book that doesn’t seem to have a point at all. It’s set up is very similar to John Henry Days but without the charm and scope of that superior book. The characters are weak and the book’s motivation is even weaker and murkier than that. In the short time it took me to read this book, I found out rather easily why this book is his least lauded one to date. At the center of this book is an unnamed black nomenclature consultant who is contacted by the town of Winthrop. The town has a bit of a conflict in that it wants to change its name but the town itself can’t agree on what it should be called. Three different groups of people of varying influence want it to be named a certain way and this consultant must figure out a way to please everyone. The best part of this novel is also its goofiest. It involves the unnamed consultant and how he lost his big toe, which involves stubbing it, multiple times and stepping in literal shit. It is where this strangely unsatisfying book gets its odd title, because Apex is the name of the bandage company. There is very little pleasing about this book, and I am glad it came early in the career of one of the most exciting and versatile writers in America today.

Rating: 2/5

Review: "The Underground Railroad" by Colson Whitehead

My reason for avoiding any book about slavery in America is the same reason I give for avoiding any book or movie about the Holocaust. I find the subject rather redundant, they make the same points over and over again, and while it is a noble cause to help people never forget such things, I have a hard time finding most modern attempts (after so many successful one) to be that interesting. So I can safely say that I probably would not have read Colson Whitehead’s new novel, The Underground Railroad if it wasn’t written by Colson Whitehead. I am a big fan of his and am always curious about what he puts out, fiction of non-fiction. And I’m really glad I picked the book up and I’m really glad I read it, because this book is the most fascinating, sophisticated and complicated book dealing with such subject matter in quite some time. Right off the bat, I can say that this is not an angry book. It doesn’t shy away from what happened, and the evils that seemed to infect a passive American conscience, but Whitehead is more interested in crafting a rather unique alternate version of the Antebellum South, one where there is an actual railroad that is underground, and one where both hunted and hunter are finely crafted individuals, and the proceedings are imbued with more than a little grey. Switching between chapters about certain characters and chapters headed with wherever the story’s action is taking place, the novel deals with Cora, a slave on a plantation in Georgia. She is a strong-willed person, who destroys a fellow slaves doghouse when part of her land is taken away (the payback is horrifying), but she is a torn individual. Her Grandma, Ajarry, lived on the plantation all her life and was complacent and happy. Her mother Mabel, on the other hand, just recently escaped. She is offered a way out by Caesar, and after a brutal beating from the plantation owner’s son, Terrance, she decides to go for it, killing a young boy who tried to catch her in the process. What made this novel so rich was its emphasis on setting, character and action. There might have been political points made, but I was too busy with the book’s intense narrative to find and decipher any. Besides Cora and Caesar, there are the people she meets on her journey to freedom, such as Sam, who she meets in South Carolina, a drunkard with a strong sense of justice and inner turmoil, Martin and Ethel, a couple she meets in North Carolina, who keep her locked up in their attic for safety and eventually sacrifice everything for her. But to me, the most memorable characters were Ridgeway the slave catcher and his group. Having failed to capture Cora’s mother (whose fate we don’t learn until the final fiery pages), he is man with a grudge, wounded pride and a sense of duty. He doesn’t show outward signs of racism toward slaves, evidenced by Homer, a free black man and Ridgeway loyal servant, but he cuts a presence, one that is violent and disturbing, and he is the true villain of the book. Whitehead has created an engaging funhouse reflection of our country’s worst era, one that is propulsive, alive and original. 

Rating: 5/5