The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

He thought long on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s letter from the Birmingham jail, and the powerful appeal the man composed from inside. One thing gave birth to the other--without the cell, no magnificent call to action. Elwood had no paper, let alone the wisdom and the way with words. The world had whispered its rules to him for his whole life and he refused to listen, hearing instead a higher order. Do not love for they will disappear, do not trust for you will be betrayed, do not stand up for you will be swatted down. Still he heard those higher imperatives: Love and that love will be returned, trust in the righteous path and it will lead you to deliverance, fight and things will change. He never listened, never saw what was plainly in front of him, and now he had been plucked from the world altogether. The only voices were of those boys below, the shouts and laughter and fearful cries, as if he floated in a bitter heaven.

Elwood Curtis is a model student with big ambitions. While his peers are listening to Smokey Robinson and the Marvelettes, he's listening to records of Martin Luther King, Jr. speeches. He is honest and scrupulous in his part-time job at a local store, and he's been accepted to an early college program. All that comes crashing down one day when he accepts a ride from a stranger who, as it turns out, has stolen the car he's driving. He avoids jail, but his fate is worse: a reform school called the Nickel Academy, where young Black kids are tortured and humiliated under a thin pretense of "improvement." Elwood tries to abide by the school's rigid guidelines, believing that his own integrity will win out, but the purpose of the Nickel School is not to improve, but to crush. He quickly finds himself in the "White House," where students are savagely beaten. Repeat offenders, he quickly learns, are "taken out back"--and never heard from again.

I don't think Colson Whitehead's books are for me. Mostly, it's the writing, which often feels to me didactic and false. The Nickel Boys is a very different book from The Underground Railroad, of course, with its magical and anachronistic elements, but in a way it tell the same kind of story, about noble but ordinary people who bear the violent costs of American racism. Like The Underground Railroad, The Nickel Boys seemed to me to have few insights about racism except that it is cruel, and really sucks. Although The Underground Railroad is the science fiction novel, both books seem to me to operate in a kind of dystopian mode, depicting racism as a kind of closed system whose obstacles to escape ironically affirm the possibility that escape is possible. Elwood's misguided nobility strikes me as not so different than someone like Katniss Everdeen: a nobility that's doomed, perhaps, but even more noble for that fact. I want to phrase this carefully, because the obvious rejoinder is that racism really is cruel, and often cruel for its own sake, and nobility in the face of it really is a remarkable trait. But for a book that's based on a true story--that of the Dozier School in Florida's Panhandle--the obvious fictiveness of The Nickel Boys seems to paper over an urgent question like, "How could this really, really happen?"

What I did sort of like about The Nickel Boys was the final twist that--spoiler alert--Elwood died in an escape attempt, and the "older" Elwood we have received glimpses of is really his fellow escapee Jack Turner, who has taken on Elwood's name as a way of honoring his dead friend. (There's some suggestion that Turner changes his name to prevent being taken back to Nickel, but I'm not sure how such an obvious pseudonym would help?) There's a glimpse there of a more interesting story--though I would say it's rather bungled by the clumsiness of the flash-forward scenes--about subterfuge, about sacrifice, about the transformations wreaked by racism on a personal level. As the stories of the Nickel School--and the bodies--are dug up at last, Turner/Elwood decides to travel back down to Florida from his New York home to share the truth at last. Now, that interests me: what compels us to hide, or lie, what compels us to reveal and come clean, and whether the truth really will set you free.