You Can't Break Me: Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys

"The world had whispered its rules to him for his whole life and he refused to listen, hearing instead a higher order. The world continued to instruct: 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 those of the boys below, the shouts and laughter and fearful cries, as if he floated in a bitter heaven."

 Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys

Colson Whitehead has asserted himself as one of the preeminent English language literary figures of our times. Emerging as a talent with his wonderfully inventive debut, The Intuitionist, he followed his first novel with a string of critical successful books, both fiction and non. It was the 2016 release of The Underground Railroad, a magical realist reimagining of the slave escape passage, that garnered him near-ubiquitous acclaim. Chosen as an Oprah book and winning the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the novel is now set for adaptation, with Oscar winning filmmaker Barry Jenkins (Moonlight) directing a six-part limited series.

With all this success, Whitehead could have been forgiven if his follow up novel, The Nickel Boys, was a bit of a letdown. Thankfully, there is no such ebb in quality here and Whitehead demonstrates that right now he's at the top of his game, giving us this haunting and tragic account of the final years of Jim Crow institutions in the the Deep South, institutions eager to give African American bodies as much pain as possible before the era of legal segregation was dismantled completely.

Elwood Curtis is a black teenager living in Georgia in the early 1960s who becomes inspired by the Civil Rights movement and the hope of desegregation it brought with it. Repeatedly listening to the one record his grandmother has, Martin Luther King at Zion Hill, Elwood embraces the emancipatory rhetoric of King and seeks to take advantage of the improved opportunities for African American youth. He studies assiduously and prepares to pursue post-secondary education when misfortune and bad timing results in his conviction for a crime he did not commit and his incarceration in a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy.

Elwood, a shy and studious boy, must quickly re-evaluate his prospects while figuring out ways to expedite his release. He learns quickly that the stern hand of violent repression still guides the reformatory's philosophy and watches in horror as any stepping out of line can result in cruel torture or death at the hands of white tormentors, none of whom will ever face any consequences. Although he finds friendships and opportunities to avoid some of the worst punitive punishments of the reformatory, Elwood must decide whether his commitment to the justice that King advocated can allow him to silently bide his time and leave in tact the corrupt school so eager to sadistically punish black children.

A gifted story teller, Whitehead's prose is more toned down compared to some of his previous work, but in The Nickel Boys it is his plotting, the slow build up to an unforgettable climax, that is so engrossing. In particular, it is the revelation at the end, one that is so unexpected (despite knowing in advance that something special happens in the end and trying to guess what was going to happen) that leaves the reader shattered. The Underground Railroad also uses a twist at the end, one of an almost absurdist quality, one fitting to explain the genesis of Cora's fantastical journey. The Nickel Boys, however, uses this slight of hand even more powerfully. While much of the novel repeats the theme quite common in African American literary canon, and Whitehead's own work, of white supremacy's subjection of black bodies to abuse and violence, the end of The Nickel Boys demands of his protagonist to take agency for these abused bodies, to refuse to let their stories disappear in past or in this case the grounds surrounding the reformatory. While devastating when revealed, it also echoed the powerful message from Whitehead's speech after winning the National Book Award:

They can't break me, because I'm a bad mother f****r

What is so amazing about Whitehead is his mastery of different voices, different techniques, different genres. Of the four books of his I have read, no two is the same, let alone similar. From the noir detective quality of The Intuitionist, to the embrace of horror and magical realism in The Underground Railroad, Whitehead appears comfortable writing anything. With The Nickel Boys we get another taste of Whitehead's talents, writing a more conventionally structured telling of Jim Crow that is gripping and powerful and incredibly timely at a time when more and more are shouting out loud to power: You can't break me.

*I received an Advanced Reader Copy of this book from Penguin Random House Canada in exchange for an honest review, which is above.

**The Nickel Boys is set to be released in Canada in July 2019.

Don Winslow's The Border: An Unapologetic Condemnation of the War on Drugs

I thankfully discovered Don Winslow several years ago when the second leg of his now complete The Cartel trilogy, was released. I picked up the audiobook and was captured immediately, taken deep into the world of drugs and its traffickers, and the accompanying violence and corruption. Winslow writes in a compelling almost journalistic style, turning the intrigue of the narcotic trade into a page turner extraordinaire.
trilogy,

Last year, Winslow announced the release of the final chapter in the story of DEA agent Art Keller and I quickly got myself a copy of The Power of the Dog, the pilot episode in this epic story of Keller and his obsession with Adán Barrera, the patron and head of the Sinaloa Cartel. In the final chapter, however, Winslow had his aim clearly on the current U.S. administration, teasing early on that the reckless behaviour and policies of Trump and his cronies would be subject to scrutiny, aptly titling the novel The Border. 

Ambitious in scope, written with gusto, pleasing to those lovers of crime fiction or political thrillers, Winslow delivers a fittingly brilliant conclusion to the trilogy that speaks to so many of the most pressing issues of the political moment.

After Keller had killed Barrera at the conclusion of The Cartel, he is recruited to head up the DEA as the Sinaloa drug empire falls into chaos and powerful players seek to replace Adan as the patron of the cartel. At times this can be messy, as many different families and alliances assert themselves and then quickly are defeated or fade. But Winslow does his best to bring the readers up to speed and allows them to get a grasp of the chaos that Barrera's death has caused.

While the Mexican forces battle for supremacy, the 2016 Presidential election takes centre stage, as a fictionalized Donald Trump, aka John Dennison, enters the race eager to scapegoat Mexican migrants for the ills of American society. At times Dennison feels cartoonish, but only because Winslow takes Trump's rhetoric verbatim when scripting Dennison's speeches, which says more about Trump's own unbelievable villainy than Winslow's writing. Dennison's son-in-law (Jared in disguise) gets roped into the drug world in the midst of the election, procuring a massive loan from cartel affiliated forces to fund a tower project that Dennison has a direct financial interest in. Keller, concerned with the fortunes of American democracy at the hands of Dennison, turns his attention to this laundering scheme and must face the inevitable backlash when Dennison surprisingly wins the election.

I must admit I was concerned with how this plot device would work. Winslow, who is very active with his views on Twitter, spends significant time challenging the Trump administrations ties to Russia and whether financial dealings between the Russian government and Trump compromise the latter's fealty to the United States. Although the Trump administration may raise such concerns, there is nothing inherently foreign about its actions nor about the thirty years of aggressive bipartisan neoliberal governance, Trump being its latest, most extreme, incarnation. Stressing Russian influence is often a substitute for looking deeply into the core rot of the American system that Trump is merely a symptom, otherizing the causes of the mess we are currently in. Thankfully, Winslow avoids this and if anything uses cartel influence of the Dennison regime to emphasize American complicity in the drug crisis. In terms of the narrative, the Dennison-drug money ties actually works quite well, allowing Winslow to delve into the realm of political thriller that does in fact deliver compelling plot points.

More powerful, however, are the vignettes into the lives of Central American migrants, often escaping civil wars or drug gangs that the United States market has encouraged. Winslow tells the story of two Guatemalan children, Nico and Flor, who flee local unrest, only to be repeatedly victimized either by criminal players or state actors, pushing them into lives of exploitation and crime. In many ways these sections are the most forceful rebuke of the Trump obsession with his wall, painting a picture of chaos and suffering that the American state has played a direct hand in causing and the very human face of those Trump eagerly dismisses as 'bad hombres' and criminals. If there are monsters in the midst, Trump and by association the United States has no one to blame but themselves for creating them.

In the end, Winslow concludes with a very explicit and bludgeoning take down of the War on Drugs. Keller, confronted by political circumstances keen on destroying him, must come to terms with his own actions and the consequences they had on innocent parties. He is forced to question whether his four decade hunt of the drug cartels was the right war to be fighting, a question whose answer is unequivocally negative.

Without a doubt, Winslow is one of the premier crime writers of our times. His research is impeccable, his story telling engrossing. He peppers the historical context with the brutal violence that colours it, and he is able to capture his readers eager to find out how this epic saga ends. If you haven't picked up Winslow, do it now, go get yourself a copy of The Power of the Dog, The Cartel and The Border and don't look back, just read and disappear into the story of the new American century.